Sophie Sparrow
Franklin Pierce Law Center

In his remarks at the AALS Conference on New Ideas for Experienced Teachers, learning theory expert and author John D. Bransford, Ph.D, noted that students learn best in environments that provide deep structures for mastering content, address students’ preconceptions, foster community and provide opportunities for reflection and feedback. Later in the conference, Charles Calleros showed how he used nonlegal materials to teach students common law analysis. Specifically, Calleros used the scenario of a grocer and her decisions about whether to place certain produce in her display window to teach stare decisis, objective case analysis, and synthesizing cases. In addition to doing an excellent job of teaching legal analysis and synthesizing cases, Calleros’s exercises also address Bransford’s criteria for optimizing learning - they build community and give students a chance to think about their own learning.

As Calleros points out in his materials, one of the reasons his grocer exercise helps students understand analysis is that students work with familiar concepts. The professor arrives in class with fruit and vegetables - some of my colleagues use those made from fabric, pottery or papier mach?, others use the real thing. From the moment students see the props for class, most know that they can talk about these items. They feel sufficiently “expert” on what a red apple is about and can describe its particulars - shape, texture, size, weight, color variations, and taste. Similarly, students can articulate why a shiny red apple would go in the display window when an unwashed, unpeeled carrot would not. They also notice nuances; when using Calleros’s exercises this fall, students noted the pitted and differentiated colors on the real fruit that was brought in. By helping them see that a red apple was more than just its surface color and shape, they could begin to see that reading cases also held similar nuances.

Mindful of Bransford’s point that students learn best when they perceive they are part of a community, I divided my class into groups of 2-4 students and gave each group a different kind of fruit or vegetable. Using previous grocer decisions as precedent, students spent some time in their groups discussing and writing the analysis about whether their eggplant, melon, lemon or pepper should go in the display window. After discussing their predictions, the groups designated a representative to show that analysis to the rest of the class. That representative had to be someone who did not frequently participate in class. Both of these helped build students’ sense of trust and openness. Discussing their analysis with others helped the students appreciate how others approach the same material from different perspectives; coaching and encouraging their quieter classmates to talk about a piece of fruit in the front of the class helped them become invested in others’ learning.

To encourage students to reflect on their own learning, at the end of the exercise I asked students to write a “minute paper” - to take a minute and write down what they had learned from the exercise that they could apply to learning other material. This gave me feedback about the exercise and the students time to think about what was effective for their own learning. In doing so, students noted that the Calleros exercise helped them see how to weave cases together and taught them that there was more than one way to find similarities between cases. Additionally, the exercise showed them that they needed to look beyond just what a court opinion stated. They realized that by looking at the principles behind the cases and at what a court did as well as what it said, they were better able to discern the possible relationships between authorities. And as Calleros points out in his materials, his exercise also helped students understand the ambiguities involved in legal reasoning, and develop some experience in understanding why law school learning is not all about learning concrete, absolute, black and white answers.

In classes and talking individually to students later in the semester, I found myself several times going back to the Calleros exercise. “Remember the fruit exercise? Well, let’s look at these cases with that in mind. How did you explain the rule then? How can you use the same technique now?” Students remembered the exercise and recalled how they had worked through the analogies and predictions. Together we later used these exercises to work through more sophisticated analysis and to organize and present them in writing. For example, in a class on critiquing the use of analogies, I brought back the fruit and vegetables to class and students articulated the specific fact-to-fact comparisons that made a red tomato more like a red apple and less like a carrot. Having shown why a tomato was more like an apple for the purposes of determining whether it should go in a display case, they could also discuss the analytical weaknesses in that prediction, talking about how the same tomato also might be more suitable for the back bin of a grocery store.

When I saw and read about Charles Calleros’s exercise, I could easily imagine that it would help my students learn common law analysis. Having struggled with how best to teach this material, the idea of having brightly colored visual aids was immensely appealing. My objective in using the grocer exercise in class was to have students come away with a sense of ownership about case analysis and synthesis. From having used these exercises, though, I realize that they accomplished much more. By having the students collaborate and coach their classmates and write about their perceptions afterwards, students were also learning about their classmates, building a supportive and encouraging environment and developing their own sense of how they learned best. And unlike exercises which students seem to learn from and then forget students learned about the grocer and her fruit in a way that they remembered for months afterwards.

Resources. For information about Calleros’s exercise see Charles R. Calleros, Using Demonstrations in Familiar Nonlegal Contexts to Teach Unfamiliar Concepts of Legal Method to New Students, forthcoming in 7 Legal Writing: the Journal of the Legal Writing Institute (2001) and on the AALS Website: http://www.aals.org/profdev/newideas/calleros.html.

For additional resources, see Charles R. Calleros, Reading, Writing and Rhythm: A Whimsical, Musical Way of Thinking about Teaching Legal Method and Writing, 5 Legal Writing: the Journal of the Legal Writing Institute 2, 10-11 (1999); Jane Gionfriddo, Using Fruit to Teach Analogy, The Second Draft (Legal Writing Inst., Seattle, Wash.) Nov. 1997, at 4 (Calleros’s inspiration was an exercise first developed by Elisabeth Keller at Boston College Law School and written up by her colleague Jane Gionfriddo);

For essays on using these and other materials to teach analysis, see generally The Second Draft (Legal Writing Inst., Seattle, Wash.) Vol. 14, No. 2, May, 2000.

Additional comments. Using materials such as fruits and vegetables, I realized too late the cultural assumptions I made when selecting these “familiar” props. After I contrasted a ripe green Granny Smith apple with a green (unripe) pear, a bright student stated that he hadn’t known that green pears were necessarily unripe; he never ate pears.