Hi All:
I have been reading the legal reasoning discussion with interest. Over
the last several years, I have had the disquieting experience of students
-large numbers of them-students who come to class, ask questions,
participate, etc.-coming to me and saying that they don't know how to
approach a project that I have used in various forms for more than twenty
years - a series of stories with contract and sales issues imbedded in
them. The students who have done problems in class seem to have little or
no ability to attack these problems without some kind of label being
attached to them. This year, I assigned a similar set of problems to
groups of students to present to the class as a group project. I told the
class that this would serve as a review for the problems that they would
be getting. The groups actually did a very good job of analyzing the
problems and presenting the issues and possible solutions. In
preparation, the groups worked up their answers and then ran them past me,
and I had to make only a few corrections. Nevertheless, I still got phone
calls from several students who said that they followed the presentation
in class but didn't know where to begin when asked to do it on their own.
I've discussed this problem with several friends and the best
understanding that I have gotten is that analyzing a legal problem is a
lot like doing word problems in math and many students do not like or are
not good at that.
Sorry for the long post but my real concern is whether students who can't
analyze a legal problem can analyze a business problem. I see us teaching
law and legal reasoning as teaching analysis and problem solving which are
fundamental skills for business and life so despite class ratings and the
like, I think we have to continue to teach legal reasoning because in the
long run that is more important to our students development than whether
they covered the nitty gritty of securities law or sales or any other
topic. I use sales as my focus topic because it is my area of interest
but in depth coverage and focus on any area can teach the skills of
reasoning and analysis.
My three and a half cents.
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Mary Ann Donnelly Office: 315-445-4432
Professor of Business Administration
Le Moyne College
Syracuse, NY 13214 [log in to unmask]
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Homepage: http://maple.lemoyne.edu/~donnelly/index.html
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On Thu, 13 Nov 1997, Peter Bowal wrote:
> Keith asked a few weeks ago about whether teaching reasoning skills meets
> with resistance. I am certain it does, since most students will dislike
> uncertainty, departures from the norm, and having to actually think and
> analyze when they are only trained to memorize and recall recipe-book
> style. If one is concerned about popularity and ratings, I wouldn't
> experiment with higher order thinking skills. Again, it may come down to
> doing what one thinks is right versus what is expedient. Sorry, if that
> sounds fatalistic, but I think it is realistic.
>
> I've always been interested in how we only look at the shopping list of law
> topics when we grant advance credit for a course, for study taken at
> another institution. We have no idea whether the student actually learned
> anything meaningful in that list, and it perpetuates the notion that
> content is more important than thinking skill. One might be as interested
> in "how" one learned, as we are in "what" one learned.
>
> Finally, we sure seem to emphasize coming up with solutions, and never seem
> to get around to developing astute question-asking ability in students. I
> am disappointed at how people cannot spot issues and frame questions. How
> many come up with really good questions for their research papers on their
> own? Do many come up with their own examples to illustrate a concept?
>
> Cheers,
>
> Peter Bowal
> University of Calgary
>
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