Lawteach: An interactive method for effective large group teaching

This paper outlines the piloting, development and evaluation of a curriculum innovation for undergraduates called Lawteach. The innovation was designed to teach law to large groups at progressively higher levels of cognitive functioning. The innovation is a substantial modification of the case method, in which the lecturer poses questions to students, based on source materials which have been studied by them in advance. Students' responses to these questions are built upon and extended by the lecturer's use of hypothetical problems, to enable students to develop concepts at increasing levels of complexity. Traditional lecturing in which the lecturer talks and the students take notes does not occur at all. In the Lawteach innovation the case method was substantially modified by the application of aspects of learning theory to develop “meaningful reception learning˚d (Ausubel, 1968) at increasingly higher levels of cognitive functioning (Bloom, 1956). The method was evaluated empirically.