Teaching Law by Design

My summary of a subsection on Selecting Instructional Strategies from Michael Schwartz's paper - Teaching Law by Design: How Learning Theory and Instructional Design Can Inform and Reform Law Teaching.

The Events of Instruction

There are general principles to designing instruction applicable to all learning objectives and learners:

• A lesson should be organised to include:
1. An introduction
2. A body
3. A conclusion, and
4. An assessment.
• Instruction should be "learner-centred, active, and meaningful."

The Instruction Introduction

The instructional introduction should accomplish 4 goals, causing learners to know what they are supposed to learn and how they are going to learn it:

1. Get students to attend the class
2. Establish the instructional purpose
3. Arouse the students' interest and attention
4. Preview the lesson

The Body of the Lesson

There are 5 events in the body of a lesson:

1. Recalling relevant prior knowledge
• Retrieve from long-term memory the knowledge and skills necessary and helpful in learning the new objective
2. Processing information and examples
• The instruction of new material (discovery or expository sequence)
3. Focusing attention
• Attend to the critical features of the concept or principle; pattern recognition
4. Employing learning strategies
• Creating a mnemonic, graphic organiser, or analogy, for example; supplying additional examples/problems; rehearsing recall and application or the learning; self-monitoring
5. Practicing, and giving feedback
• Problem-solving not to evaluate for grading purposes, but to allow the learners to develop their skills under supervision; should be sequenced from easy to hard
• Feedback should be informational; students should be told if their analysis is reasonable or not and why; feedback should be coupled with additional practice if the learner did not enjoy sufficient success
• For problem-solving objectives, it is recommended students are provided with a model answer
• Hints and guidance should be included early on during practice, but should decrease as learners develop their skills

The Conclusion of the Lesson

The overarching goal of the conclusion section is to allow students to consolidate their new learning. It consists of 3 events:

1. Summarise and review
• It takes time to fully grasp new learning; periodic cumulative review is recommended to ensure recall
2. Transfer learning
• The application of learning to new contexts; reference near transfer (application in a similar context) and far transfer (application in different situations)
3. Re-motivate and close
• Appreciate the importance of the learning; explore how information can be used in the future

Assessment

Suggest remediation instruction for those students who failed to demonstrate competency on the assessment. One way to implement this is to require those students who did not pass an assessment to restudy the subject matter and then (a) explain their errors, or (b) take a new form of the test.