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What the Best Law Teachers Do
This pioneering book is the first to identify the methods, strategies, and personal traits of law professors whose students achieve exceptional learning. Modeling good behavior through clear, exacting standards and meticulous preparation, these instructors know that little things also count--starting on time, learning names, responding to emails.
eBook
What the Best Law Teachers Do
What makes a great law professor? The first study of its kind, What the Best Law Teachers Do identifies the methods, strategies, and personal traits of professors whose students achieve exceptional learning. This pioneering book will be of interest to any instructor seeking concrete, proven techniques for helping students succeed.
What the Best Law Teachers Do introduces readers to twenty-six professors from law schools across the United States. These instructors are renowned for their exacting standards: they set expectations high, while also making course requirements--and their belief that their students can meet them--clear from the outset. They demonstrate professional behavior and tell students to approach class as they would their future professional life: by being as prepared, polished, and gracious as possible. And they prepare themselves for class in depth, even when they have taught the course for years.
The best law professors understand that the little things matter. They start class on time and stay afterward to answer questions. They learn their students' names and respond promptly to emails. These instructors are all tough--but they are also committed, creative, and compassionate mentors. With its close-to-the-ground accounts of exceptional educators in action, What the Best Law Teachers Do offers insights into effective pedagogy that transcend the boundaries of legal education.
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How Do the Best Law Teachers Engage Students in and out of the Classroom?
The classes of the twenty-six teachers we studied sometimes seem almost magical, suggesting that good teaching is more art than science. Overall, these teachers share four core behaviors in the classroom. They (1) consciously structure their class sessions to achieve their learning goals, (2) show they care about students, (3) make classes relevant, and (4) are extremely effective with their chosen teaching methods. In addition, they extend their teaching outside the classroom, effectively handle teaching challenges, and begin and end classes and courses well.
Most of the teachers we studied provide their students with explicit learning goals at the beginning
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Suggestions for Using this Book
Working on this project has been an awe-inspiring experience. Talking to the selected teachers, reading their materials, reviewing their student evaluations, hearing from their current and former students, and observing these teachers in the classroom have deeply moved and inspired us.
All readers can learn from the words and actions of the teachers in this book. Whether you have been teaching for years, aspire to teach, work with teachers, teach a course on legal education, or are just interested in teaching, we invite you to reflect upon and develop your approach to teaching and learning by reading about these teachers.
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What Is Exceptional Learning in Law School?
While the primary goal of this project was to learn more about the twenty-six law teachers we studied, we had a secondary goal of enriching our conception of what exceptional learning meant in the law-school context. Consequently, we asked the approximately two hundred law professors, deans, students, alumni, and other nominators to articulate their views on what constitutes exceptional learning in law school. We prompted nominators with a working definition of exceptional learning (Box 1). We based this definition on Ken Bain’s definition of exceptional learning inWhat the Best College Teachers Do.
We invited nominators to suggest their own
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How Do the Best Law Teachers Relate to Their Students?
All teachers begin to establish a relationship with their students on the first day of class. The teachers we studied are particularly thoughtful and intentional about the messages they send at the very beginning of a course.
Nancy Levit explains how she prepares to build a positive relationship from day one: “The most important cornerstone of how I teach begins with establishing a relationship with each of my students. This begins before the first day they are in my class. When I get the class lists, I look up how to pronounce each student’s name and make it a point
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How Do the Best Law Teachers Prepare to Teach?
The teachers we studied prepare themselves for every class as if they were doing so for the first time. They reimagine themselves as novices in their fields and consider the student perspective. They prioritize their most important learning goals, and they plan teaching strategies to achieve those goals. They reflect on their role as teachers and role models as they prepare. Andy Liepold describes his thinking about class preparation in a way that epitomizes the teachers we studied: “Taking teaching seriously means working very hard to prepare for class. . . . The hard part is to do the scud
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How Do the Best Law Teachers Provide Feedback and Assess Students?
The exceptional teachers we studied integrate feedback and assessment to help students learn complex course material. As Julie Nice states, “I don’t know how to do assessment other than as another learning opportunity.” Paula Lustbader echoes this point: “They learn by doing. They learn by practicing again. They learn by getting a lot of feedback and tweaking and coming back. . . . They learn different ways. Not just that different students learn different ways, each student learns from different stimulus.”
Many of the teaching behaviors, expectations, and personal qualities depicted earlier in this book also describe how these excellent
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