Teaching Resources From Great Britain
by
Gerry Hess

Readers who enjoy The LAW TEACHER and who utilize other Institute programs to improve teaching and learning in law school should check out the National Centre for Legal Education (NCLE) in Great Britain. The NCLE was established in 1997 at the University of Warwick "to encourage and support the pursuit of innovative teaching and learning methodologies in law." The NCLE has programs and resources useful to North American law teachers: the Learning in Law Initiative, a Web site, and a newsletter.

Learning in Law Initiative (LILI): The National Centre created the LILI to facilitate the dissemination of good practices and new materials in legal education. The LILI has begun a network of teachers at law schools in Great Britain. Each school identifies a teacher with primary responsibility for distributing information on teaching and learning. In addition to creating the network, the LILI will conduct annual conferences on legal education. The first conference, held in January 1999, addressed assessment of learning, teaching and learning methods, maintaining quality, and managing change.

NCLE Web Site (www.law.warwick.ac.uk/ncle): The NCLE Web site has several areas of interest for law teachers. It describes the NCLE's background, objectives, and current activities. The Resource Bank contains teaching materials and ideas. The Directory provides links to academic and government organizations in the UK, e-mail addresses for legal academics, and a list of law journals available on the World Wide Web. In the future, the Directory will include a bibliography of publications in the area of legal education, book reviews, articles on teaching law, and government reports of interest to legal educators.

Newsletter: The NCLE publishes a newsletter twice each year. It is available in hard copy or on the NCLE Web site. The NCLE newsletter contains information about the NCLE's programs and short articles on teaching and learning law. The story in the box below appeared in the Autumn 1998 edition and illustrates the type of interesting and helpful ideas available from the NCLE.

Steps to Learning

In general, students will learn more, and more deeply, when they. . .

1. Engage actively -- intellectually and emotionally -- in their academic work.
2. Set and maintain high, personally meaningful expectations and goals.
3. Provide, receive, and make use of regular, timely, specific feedback.
4. Become explicitly aware of their values, beliefs, preconceptions, and prior learning -- and are willing to unlearn when necessary.
5. Are instructed in ways that recognize and stretch their present learning styles/preferences and levels of development.
6. Seek and find connections to, and real-world applications of, what they are learning.
7. Understand and value the criteria, standards, and methods by which they are assessed and evaluated.
8. Work regularly and productively with academic staff.
9. Work regularly and productively with other students.
10. Invest as much engaged time and high-quality effort as possible in their academic work.

["Steps to Learning" was extracted from a paper titled Ten Levers for Higher Learning presented by Thomas A. Angelo, The School for New Learning, DePaul University, Chicago, to the 6th Improving Student Learning Symposium, 7-9 September 1998, University of Brighton.]