Professors Howard Katz (Charlotte School of Law) and Kevin O’Neill (Cleveland-Marshall) recently posted a draft of a law review article as part of Cleveland-Marshall Legal Studies Papers (No. 07-144) entitled "Strategies and Techniques of Law School Teaching: A Primer for New Teachers." While this article does not appear to be finalized, it does provide helpful information to new law school professors. I found the suggestion about "shadow textbooks" (where professors use portions of unassigned texts for classroom ideas and hypo’s) to be most interesting. The abstract is below.
Much has been written about law school teaching. In our
view, the contributions of Kent Syverud, Susan Becker, and
Douglas Whaley are especially valuable. Why, then, did we bother
to write this article? Because most articles focus narrowly on
specific teaching techniques or on particular law school courses.
Only a few offer general advice to the new teacher. No article,
to our knowledge, has ever furnished detailed and comprehensive
advice on how to teach a law school course – from choosing a book
and designing a syllabus to orchestrating the classroom
experience to creating and grading the final exam. That is the
aim of this article.
Mitch Rubinstein