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Conference on New Ideas for Experienced Teachers

June 9–13, 2001
Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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  Using a First-Year Course to Teach the Lenses of Critical Reading
(text of Power Point presentation)

Prof. Christina L. Kunz, 2001
ckunz@wmitchell.edu
June 2001

Thoughtful Propositions

  • Your students might not be reading as skillfully as you think they are.
  • Some student errors that look like thinking shortfalls are really reading shortfalls.
  • Pulling reading skills into the foreground might allow you to teach doctrine more thoroughly and speedily.

More Thoughtful Propositions

  • Good reading skills provide a strong base for other analytical skills, but good analytical skills cannot be built on a base of poor reading skills.
  • Our students are readers of a new genre (novices to legal discourse); we can speed their progress out of novice status by teaching them the heuristics (tricks of the trade) of reading law.

Final Proposition

  • read law textbooks critically, students need to be taught
    • how to use a range of reading lenses,
    • which settings demand particular lenses, and
    • which lenses are better suited to various learning styles.
  • Analogy to an expert photographer’s choice of lenses and filters
In my Contracts class last year, I began to experiment with these reading lenses:
  • Reading lenses for rules of law
  • A microscopic reading lens for book-briefing cases
  • Reading lenses for broader and deeper understanding of cases

In ch. 1 on mutual assent, I pulled the rules of law out of the cases and gave them to the students.
For the 1st ten weeks of law school, we worked exclusively on these rules, using the following lenses, one at a time. The subject of offer and acceptance lends itself well to this approach.

Reading lenses for rules of law:

  • Paraphrasing rules into if/then form
    • (helps students separate factual elements from the legal consequences of the rule)
  • Flow charts and other graphic depictions
    • (helps students with visual learning styles; shows graphic difference between conjunctive and disjunctive rules)

More reading lenses for rules of law:

  • Applying a rule to packaged facts
    • To understand the rule in an applied setting
    • To see difficulties in applying the rule
  • Applying multiple rules to packaged facts
    • To start to build the skill of ordering rules in a deductive framework
  • Fusing rules on the same narrow topic into a single rule
    • To avoid memorizing the same rule in eight different phrasings
  • Grouping the fused rules, and ordering the groups of rules
  • Figuring out the hierarchical relationships among groups of rules
    • To set the stage for outlining skills

In week 8, we moved into the casebook for the first time.
The assignment for the section on Statute of Frauds was to extract the rules from the cases and to apply the reading lenses we already had learned how to use.

A microscopic reading lens for “book-briefing” cases

  • In week 11, after the mid-term, we began the chapter on consideration.
  • I instructed students how to read cases with a microscopic lens
    • Identifying the analytical role of each line of text
    • Being able to see the analytical structure of the case at a glance
  • See your handout, pp. 1-3
    • Traditional case-briefing components, broken into 22 or so sub-components
    • Required for rest of year
  • At beginning of 2nd semester, we were able to pick up the pace.
    • I posted pre-reading questions for each week’s classes, many of which taught the uses of the final set of reading lenses.

Reading lenses for broader and deeper understanding

  • Purpose: To deepen reading skills into analytical skills
  • Reading for your own learning style
    • Big picture first or last?
  • Stakeholder analysis of parties’ interests and public policies
    • How they influence court’s decision
    • How they cause jurisdictional splits

Reading lenses for broader and deeper understanding

  • T-charts (looking for flaws in reasoning)
    • Advantages and disadvantages of rule
    • Linkages among arguments, counter-arguments, and refutations
    • Proof structure: reasoning steps in left column, supporting authority in right column
  • Branch-point analysis
    • Arguments in the alternative
    • By parties or by the court
  • Questions about how historical context influenced the case (looking back)
  • Questions about how the dispute could have been prevented (looking forward)
  • Reading across cases, from lens of textbook author
    • Historical evolution of a rule
    • Splits among jurisdictions
    • Alternative approaches
      • Wrong and right
      • Differing policies and directions
  • Reading across chapters
    • Consistency of policies
    • Re-appearance of similar issues
    • Issues commonly paired with each other

Advantages

  • Greater coverage (6-8 hours gained)
    • 4 hours of in-class work on outlining
    • 2 in-class exams
    • 5 quizzes
    • Full coverage of 3rd-party beneficiaries and assignment/delegation
  • Better class discussion and attention
  • Better student performance on exams
  • Student loyalty and gratitude

Disadvantages

  • A lot of time developing class materials
  • A lot of time giving feedback to students and gauging students’ progress
    • Looking at student work
    • Individual conferences
    • Tests and quizzes (nearly all multiple choice)

Application of critical reading skills to other courses

  • Any other first-year course
  • Commercial Transactions (Sales)
  • Negotiating and Drafting Business Agreements
  • Feminist Jurisprudence
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