Alice M. Thomas, University of the District of Columbia Background I recently completed an article for publication entitled, “Laying the Foundation for Better Student Learning in the Twenty-First Century: Incorporating an Integrated Theory of Legal Education into Doctrinal Pedagogy.” 6 Widener L. Symp. J. 49 (Fall 2000). The basic premise of this article is that legal academia, especially doctrinal teachers, must re-conceive the law school teaching paradigm, i.e., delivery system, if legal education is to remain relevant in the Twenty-First century. For too long, the art and practice of teaching have been left to isolated moments of inspiration and anecdotal conveyance. As a result, law school teaching has been constructed on personal experiences and the limited transmission of anecdotal experiences passed from one generation of law teacher to the next. Evidence of the less theoretical approach to teaching within legal academia is the fact that persons hired to teach law are rarely schooled in student learning and educational theory. Few law teacher hires are ever expected to possess any teaching experience or teaching practice know-how. I suggest, in my article, that law teachers can improve their teaching, which will lead to better student learning, if we take a systematic and scholarly look at the act of teaching. This belief is anchored by the idea that teaching rooted in theory is the most effective form of teaching for maximizing student learning, and student learning is the only reason to teach. The Presentation I would like to present at the Calgary Conference to share both my ideas about teaching based on theory and to show how I have carried out this approach in my own teaching with concept mapping. I believe that the chief goal of law school learning is to produce a self-motivated and self-regulated creative problem solver in the law student. Law students must be able to transfer old learning to new, yet identified, complex problem situations. This need requires law teachers to teach in a way that student understanding is deepened and highly transferable. I advocate for the adoption of a personal theory of education by all law teachers. The personal theory of education is anchored by two components -- one, a theory of legal education, which is informed by the scholarship of teaching, and two, experiential teaching. This theory requires the integration of theoretical perspectives about the interaction of five key components in the learning process -- the teacher, the learner, contructivist ideas about knowledge acquisition, evaluation and instruction. Focusing on the learner, I embrace the theoretical perspective that the most valuable form of learning for law students is meaningful learning as advanced by Dr. David Ausubel, and modified by constructivist theories about learning. The central tenet of this perspective is that meaningful learning requires teachers to assess the core knowledge students bring to the classroom and teach in a way that permits students to link the new information to the student’s existing cognitive, or thinking, framework, and that permits students to correct faulty understandings. New information learned in this way is retained longer, leading to higher-order thinking skills, a higher degree of transferability and more creative problem solving. If selected to make a presentation, I will show how I structured my introductory contracts course around this theory of learning and used an assessment tool developed by Dr. Joseph Novak, a chemistry teacher and learning theory scholar, known as a “concept map,” to monitor student learning over the course of the semester. The concept map is a potentially valuable tool for assessing what students already know, right or wrong, about content, logic, and analytical framework and a valuable tool for tracking the increased and deepening understandings of students over the course of a semester. With this additional information, the law professor can adjust the delivery of the substantive course material to facilitate the transformation of students from novice to expert learners.