Education Commons^™

Teaching, Thinking, And The Legal Creative Process, Barbara P. Blumenfeld

Faculty Scholarship

The author asks how we can teach student how to think as she reflects on how many students with excellent basic writing skills were not fully developing the reasoning before writing their paper.

Part One of this essay formulates the creative process necessary for developing good legal analysis, arguments, and documents, and suggests its encouragement by non-result oriented teaching. Part Two explains a class the author designed, which succeeds, at least in part, in bringing thinking to the surface for study and discussion.

Can Reading Questions Foster Active Learning? A Study Of Six College Courses, Kathryn M. Plank, Tomas M. Koontz

Faculty Scholarship

Many instructors strive to encourage student reading outside of class and active learning in class. One pedagogical tool, structured reading questions, can help do both. Using examples from question sets across six courses, the authors illustrate how reading questions can help students achieve the six active-learning principles described by Svinicki (1991). Qualitative and quantitative assessment data indicate that students often complete readings before class, that they view the questions as very helpful in their learning, and that they use the questions primarily to help understand what information is important and connect it to prior knowledge. Some differences in use are …

Can Havruta Style Learning Be A Best Practice In Law School?, Barbara P. Blumenfeld

Faculty Scholarship

Havruta is a traditional Jewish method that seems compatible with legal education because of its focus on process, and so adaptable to law school training in legal reasoning, and because it is based upon dispute and resolution, another aspect that corresponds with the study of law. A unique form of collaborative student centered learning involving pairs of students, this article considers the application of Havruta to the law school setting and whether it should be incorporated into the law school curriculum.