An Innovative Contracts Course at UVA
Here’s a taste:
Professor Rip Verkerke [pictured] has developed an innovative contracts course at the University of Virginia School of Law. (full story here) He received a grant “to convert a fall-semester course into a ‘hybrid technology-enhanced’ offering.” In addition to using innovative technology in his class, he redesigned his course as a “flipped” classroom model, “in which students watch pre-recorded lectures outside of class and participate in more interactive learning inside the classroom. . .” His goal for this flipped model is “to promote deeper learning for students.” The article states, “he has taken a quantum leap this year in reimagining how to teach Contracts with online tools and a new understanding of how students learn.”
Scott Fruehwald adds:
This is exactly the type of class that law schools should be teaching to better prepare their students for the contemporary legal world. Problem-solving exercises force students to apply what they have learned to facts, and studies have shown that students learn more when they apply their knowledge. Small-group discussions, along with the problem-solving exercises, make the students active learners, rather than passive receptacles as the Socratic method does. Education scholarship has determined that frequent formative assessment helps students learn more and remember more. I suspect that Verkerke’s nightly quizzes are especially effective. He is also developing metacognitive learning by asking metacognitive questions to his students and causing them to self-reflect. (”What aspect(s) of the materials in this module did you find most difficult or confusing?’ is a metacognitive question because it forces the students to “think about their thinking.”)
In sum, Professor Verkerke’s Contracts class is a model of what a law school class should be. Hats off to Professor Verkerke!
The rest can be found here.
[JT]