| Summary: |
Who was your best teacher, law or otherwise? What
made that teacher so effective?
For the past four years, we have posed these questions at conferences,
law schools, and to groups of Chilean, Georgian, Ira ni an,
and Turkish law teachers. In response, law teachers have described
their best teachers’ attitudes, expectations, teaching methods, mental
habits, beliefs about students and learning, personal qualities,
teaching emphases, and anything else that made their teachers so
noteworthy. The results have been strikingly similar. Across cultures
and schools, the best teachers distinguish themselves by their
thoughtfulness, caring about their students, high expectations, commitment
to student learning, and ability to engage their students.Those same qualities distinguish the twenty- six law teachers we
have written about in this book.
Starting in spring 2008, we sought to study extraordinary law
teachers, teachers who have a signifi cant, positive, and long- term effect
on their students. Our goal was to create the fi rst systematic,
rigorous study of excellent law teaching. We have written and read a
number of scholarly efforts at synthesizing the teaching and learning
research from other fi elds; we wanted to contribute something new
that would be credible to our colleagues. We also were cognizant that
other works have identifi ed many ways legal education and law teachers
need to change; we wanted to offer something different.
This book is the product of that four- and- a-half- year study. In
the pro cess, we have reviewed hundreds of nominations and visited
the law schools where the subjects of this book were teaching. We
observed each subject teach, interviewed their students, and scrutinized
thousands of pages of interview transcripts, student evaluations,
testimonial letters, and teaching materials.
We recognize that the term “best†is hard to defi ne, as we explain
below. However, we believe that we have identifi ed twenty- six great
US law teachers. We chose the title for this book, What the Best Law
Teachers Do, for several reasons. First, it echoes the title of its pre deces
sor book, Ken Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do. Second, we
believe that our results also refl ect not only what excellent law
teachers do, but also what excellent teachers in other fi elds do.
|