Dear Colleagues:
The AALS Teaching Methods Section plans to host an exciting program called “Reaching Students Effectively: Contemporary Challenges and Opportunities in Legal Education” at the 2017 AALS Annual Meeting in San Francisco (January 3-7, 2017). Here is our current vision of the program, followed by the call for proposals:
Reaching Students Effectively: Contemporary Challenges and Opportunities in Legal Education
We are in the midst of a time of great change in legal education. We face new obstacles and new opportunities as we work to find the best means of engaging and teaching today’s law students. As part of this program, we will ask panelists to spotlight effective teaching methods for overcoming new challenges and embracing new opportunities in one or more of these topic areas:
1. Technology (whether used by students inside or outside of the classroom or by educators to teach inside or outside the classroom)
2. Student emotional intelligence or self-awareness
3. Student aptitude (particularly if perceived to be lower due to recent admissions trends)
4. Changing law market needs and demands (e.g., of prospective employers)
5. Developments in learning theory, research, and literature
We hope addressing these topics
also
will help to ignite a broader dialogue about the challenges and opportunities presented by teaching and learning inside and outside the modern law school classroom. By program’s end, attendants should have some concrete ideas for teaching in their own classes in new and inspiring ways.
The Call
We welcome one-page proposals that address effective teaching methods for overcoming new challenges and embracing new opportunities with respect to one or more of the topic areas, as posed by the program description above. In responding, please keep in mind:
• The proposal may address any law school substantive course area, but we hope for the audience (presumed to include educators that teach in a broad variety of course areas) to be able to relate the presented methods to their own classes.
• Proposals featuring any type of interactive learning exercise that will engage the audience — especially a method used by the presenter with her or his own students — will be greeted with heightened enthusiasm.
Please submit proposals to the Program Chair Professor Michael Bloom via email at bloomich@umich.edu by
March 1, 2016. The program committee looks forward to reviewing
your proposals
and to learning about your innovations and ideas for making legal education in the modern era come alive for our students.
MICHAEL L. BLOOM
Director, Transactional Lab & Clinic
Clinical Assistant Professor
Univ. of Michigan Law School
734.763.3812
