Christina L. Kunz, William Mitchell College of Law Using a First-Year Course to Teach the Lenses of Critical Reading The pedagogy of the traditional first-year classroom is ripe for revision. From the top to the bottom of the class, perhaps the most persistent problem in the first year of law school is the slow development of critical reading skills. Some students come to law school with poor critical reading skills from college. Others read well in their area of specialization, but lag behind in gaining reading skills in legal sources. Most first-year professors overestimate their students’ ability to read critically, so they ascribe poor class performance to poor reasoning skills, rather than the real shortfall-students not understanding the material or not reading it closely enough. This past semester, I got a chance to see those shortfalls “up close and personal” in my Contracts class. Week after week, my assignments focused on building and assessing my students’ critical reading skills. This approach allowed me to bring reading and reasoning skills out of the background, so that they enjoyed “equal billing” with the doctrinal law on mutual assent, statute of frauds, and consideration. Students thereby learned the doctrinal aspects of the course better, while gaining skills pertinent to other classes as well. Many first-year professors assume that students can find, understand, and group rules into cohesive categories, then fuse the related rules. However, my previous examination of student outlines prepared for exams has indicated strongly to the contrary, even as to students in the upper portion of the class. My current hypothesis is that we need to teach and practice these skills more overtly, by teaching how to read material in differing ways, depending on the nature of the material and its use. I began by working on how to read rules of law. I gave students the rules of law, as phrased in the cases on mutual assent, and asking them to rework those rules into correct paraphrases. (For the paraphrases, I used asked for an if/then or if/then/unless format.) As we worked on that skill, we also started to work on the skill of fusing the rules on the same narrow topic, so that the student ended up with one rule per narrow topic, rather than several overlapping rules. After the class became comfortable with those skills, I gave them rules on a variety of topics and asked them to group the rules into categories of increasingly complex sets and subsets. Each of these skills took several rounds of repetition before competencies began to emerge. Next, we began working on applying the fused rules to facts. I gave students the relevant facts from the cases that contained the rules that we already had fused, and I asked them to apply the rules to the facts to answer my specified question. We worked on structuring a deductive proof. For each step, students gave the rule, the relevant facts, and the result of applying that rule to the facts. I asked students not to read the case opinion until we had completed the class on those facts. Sometimes the class came to a different result than the court, and correctly so. Then we began reading more complex rules of law, namely the UCC rules on contract formation and enforceability, with multiple if/then statements for each section and intricate exceptions. We also worked on applying those rules to facts in deductive proofs. In week 10, we began reading case opinions in their entirety. However, instead of using traditional case briefing, I asked students to read each case carefully, labeling each phrase or sentence as one of many case components that I described in a handout. This “micro case reading lens” allowed my students to become much more savvy readers of cases who were more prepared for the questions about arguments and counter-arguments, disputed facts and findings of fact, and sub-issues within an issue. Next semester, I plan to continue to introduce students to additional reading lenses for cases and statutes. By the time of this presentation, I will be able to add those reading lenses as well (stakeholder analysis of competing policy interests and how they lead to split opinions and split rules of law, how to analyze and evaluate analogical reasoning, analysis of the court’s faulty reasoning deductively and analogically, T-charts of arguments and counter-arguments and refutations, T-charts of advantages and disadvantages of particular legal solutions, depicting reasoning in the alternative as branch-points, etc.) Professor Kunz will share her ideas during a special presentation at the Conference on New Ideas on Tuesday, June 12.