Michael Hunter Schwartz and Gregory Steven Sergienko, Western State University Tailoring Instructional Techniques to Instructional Objectives Designing effective law school instruction requires more than appropriate learning objectives and ideas for how to accomplish them; good instruction also requires classifying the objectives according to the types of learning they involve and thoughtfully selecting from among the instructional techniques appropriate to those objectives. Instructional theorists such as Robert Gagne and Benjamin Bloom have developed categories for understanding the types of learning involved in law school instruction. Patricia Smith and Tillman Ragan, authors of the leading instructional design text, have synthesized thousands of studies to develop best practices for achieving each type of learning objective. Together, these theorists have produced a body of materials from which law professors can cull principles for creating effective instruction. Gagne’s and Bloom’s learning categories (“taxonomies”) allow us to recognize the types of learning we teach and to classify our objectives. In what Gagne collectively refers to as “intellectual skills” and what Bloom calls “application,” “analysis,” “synthesis” and “evaluation,” we can find all the skills and sub-skills represented by our notion of “legal analysis.” We can see that these skills are hierarchical, build on each other, and build on foundations of basic information, which Gagne calls “declarative knowledge” and which Bloom calls “recall” and “comprehension.” Smith and Ragan’s work enables us to tailor our instruction to each of the types of learning outcomes our objectives represent. We can help our students develop their skills and, eventually, to become the legal problem-solving experts we want them to become by selecting from among the instructional techniques Smith and Ragan suggest are best suited to our particular types of learning outcomes. In our presentation, we will use Gagne’s categories and Smith and Ragan’s best practices as tools for designing a law school lesson. We will plan instruction designed to teach students the language interpretation skills running across the body of contracts law (e.g., interpreting parties’ communications in forming contracts, interpreting contractual ambiguities, interpreting alleged express and constructive conditions). In other words, we have planned a vignette in which we show how participants can apply Gagne, Bloom and Smith and Ragan to create a law school lesson. Because we will base our selections of instructional techniques on the types of learning outcomes represented by our objectives, we will demonstrate the importance of identifying instructional objectives and of classifying the learning outcomes those objectives represent. In addition, our approach will allow us to introduce the wide range of possible instructional techniques open to law school instructors, and our process of selecting from among those choices will model an approach to reasoning through selections. More concretely, we will demonstrate, both in our vignette and by our selection of techniques for our presentation, many of Smith and Ragan’s recommendations for teaching intellectual skills and the skills and knowledge that underlie them. Our use of the think aloud technique, for example, mirrors one of the techniques we will suggest a contracts instructor use to teach the thinking process of analyzing contract interpretation problems. Our choice to focus on a problem-solving task, creating the lesson, rather than on the many principles of instructional design on which we will rely, reflects another important instructional design principle. Contrary to the common assumption that learners can acquire high level problem solving skills solely from instruction on the applicable principles, Smith and Ragan show learners also must be taught the analysis and solution of the difficult, textured problems they must learn to solve. Finally, our conference materials will use graphic organizers, chunking, mnemonics and other techniques to help participants learn basic knowledge about instructional design, and we, during our presentation, will plan similar handouts to help students learn the relevant doctrine.