Many years ago, I was teaching a Remedies class to students enrolled in my then-law school’s evening program. One night, a student let me know in advance that her childcare for the evening had fallen through and asked for permission to bring her 10-year-old son to class. She assured me he was well behaved, and, in fact, he was. I, of course, said yes.

About 35 minutes into class, I asked the students to write out their answers to a complex hypothetical and gave them ten minutes to do so. The room became silent except for the clickity-clack of students typing on their laptops. All of a sudden, I heard the loudest whisper I had ever heard come out of the ten-year-old’s mouth; he whispered, “Mommy, writing is learning.” I smiled, resisted the urge to give the boy a high five in gratitude, and let the students finish writing their answers.

Some teaching experts might call my exercise that night a “free writing” exercise; such opportunities are ubiquitous in K-12 education, as my student’s son clearly had experienced. Such experiences help with encoding the information and future recall because the act of writing helps strengthen the memory tie, especially if you encourage your students to write their answers without looking up the doctrine. Strong memory ties support exam success because, if the student can recall the doctrine with little mental effort, they are left with greater mental resources to complete the more challenging analytical work. 

My student’s son was even more right than he had imagined. In law school, we overwhelmingly assesses students via written exams and papers, and, in the legal profession, strong writing skills are critical to success in practice. Consequently, the learning students take away from writing is central to our enterprise as legal educators. Every time students have an opportunity to practice performing legal analysis in writing and get feedback on their work, even by comparing their answers to an answer generated by the class or a model answer provided by the professor, our students have an opportunity to grow their skills.

Because writing is, indeed, learning, integrating frequent opportunities to practice writing legal analysis can only improve your students’ performance on their exams. 

And there is even a benefit for your teaching. Students who have had time to the think and write regarding a class hypothetical contribute more fully conceived and thoughtful ideas.