Author: Michael Hunter Schwartz
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Perlman: Generative AI and the Future of Legal Scholarship (June 2026 Edition)
Dean and Professor Andrew Perlman of Suffolk Law (but mostly Claude Fable 5 (Max)), Generative AI and the Future of Legal Scholarship (June 2026 Edition). Dean Perlman shares a law review article generated by Claude Fable 5 (Max) in less than an hour based on the following prompt: You are going to write a cutting-edge…
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Faculty Focus: Building Psychological Safety in College Classrooms Through Cooperative and Experiential Learning
Dr. Ana Figueroa (Faculty Focus), Building Psychological Safety in College Classrooms Through Cooperative and Experiential Learning (June 10, 2026). This article, filled with insights and evidentiary data from a study the author conducted. She persuasively explains how cooperative learning experiences and experiential learning can help create psychological safety for our students, which Dr. Figueroa defines…
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Teaching Tidbit of the Week: Take Your Model Answers to the Next Level with Cognitive Think-Alouds
This week’s teaching tidbit addresses a technique for helping your students grow their analytical skills after they have completed a formative assessment. Many law professors provide model answers or issue outlines for midterm essay exams so that their students get a clear understanding of expectations. Many others provide, with the students’ consent, the answers of…
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Faculty Focus: Where to Go From “I Don’t Know”: Building Trust Through Authenticity
Cassidy Downs, Faculty Focus, Where to Go From “I Don’t Know”: Building Trust Through Authenticity (May 15, 2026) In this terrific essay, Downs explores tools for responding to a student question when you do not know the answer. Her introduction sets us up well for reconsidering a moment most of us experience with anxiety. In…
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Teaching Tidbit: Respond to the Email You WISH Your Student Had Sent
This week’s teaching tidbit shares a lesson that Professor Susan Keller of Western State College of Law taught me. Professor Keller, my first law professor mentor, gave me brilliant advice for responding constructively to an angry student email. Professor Keller taught me to respond to the version of the email I wish the student had sent. Many…
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Teaching Tidbit: Write a Great Syllabus, Part II
This week’s teaching tidbit takes up where last week’s post left off. Both posts suggest ways you can draft syllabi that advance goals common among us, i.e., creating a welcoming, inclusive culture, encouraging students, advancing a culture of constructive disagreement, communicating our high expectations, and demonstrating our passion for our subjects and for student success.…
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Cult of Pedagogy: Growth Discourse
Jennifer Gonzalez, Cult of Pedagogy, Growth Discourse: A Framework for Discussing Hard Topics with Students (December 7, 2025). This article offers concrete suggestions for facilitating conversations about challenging topics drawing on the work of the School for Ethics and Global Leadership. It details four strategies for facilitating hard conversations: creating a community where all students…
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Edutopia: 28 Ways to Quickly Check for Understanding
Daniel Leonard, 28 Ways to Quickly Check for Understanding (May 19, 2024) The subheading offers a preview of the great ideas to follow: From sketching comics to drafting tweets, these fun—and fast—ways to check for understanding are creative and flexible. My four favorites are: asking students to write a six-word headline, create quiz questions, write…
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Teaching Tidbit of the Week: Write a Syllabus that Sets You Up for a Great Semester
This week’s and next week’s teaching tidbits focus on creating syllabi that advance goals common among us, i.e., creating a welcoming, inclusive culture, encouraging students, advancing a culture of constructive disagreement, communicating our high expectations, and demonstrating our passion for our subjects and for student success. In addition, as you might expect, these two tidbits…
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Teaching Tidbit: Read (or Ignore) My Teaching Philosophy
For this week’s post, I am rearticulating my teaching philosophy. Writing my teaching philosophy is more than an exercise for me. I am returning to the classroom full time this fall for the first time since 2013, and I am writing my teaching philosophy to center myself on my teaching values. I have been troubled…
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Cult of Pedagogy: How Unconditional Positive Regard Transforms Classrooms
Jennifer Gonzalez (Cult of Pedagogy), Nothing’s Going to Change My Mind: How Unconditional Positive Regard Transforms Classrooms (September 18, 2023). This article starts with acknowledging an issue that the author reports to be prevalent in K-12 education, but I must confess that I have seen it a lot in legal education, too. I worked with far…
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Edutopia: 16 Variations on Think-Pair-Share to Keep Students Engaged
Todd Finley (Edutopia), 16 Variations on Think-Pair-Share to Keep Students Engaged: Teachers and students use this classic learning strategy often. To keep it from getting stale, try these tweaks (December 6, 2024). In a Teaching Tidbit TaxProf Blog post, I explained why using a variety of teaching techniques increases engagement and enhances learning. At this…
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Cult of Pedagogy: How and Why to Use Concept Maps
Jennifer Gonzalez, Cult of Pedagogy, How and Why to Use Concept Maps (October 12, 2025). I have a new, rich addition to my resources on teaching and learning; it’s a website called Cult of Pedagogy. The referenced post explains how concept maps can strengthen and deepen students’ learning, particularly their understanding of the relationships among…
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Teaching Tidbit of the Week: Consider Becoming a Teaching and Learning Scholar
As a young professor, my first two scholarship works were (at best) mediocre imitations of the brilliant scholarly work of my first mentor. I was struggling to enjoy and complete my work. Then, by random luck, I discovered that I could more directly align my passion for student learning and for teaching with my scholarly…
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Teaching Tidbit of the Week: Choose the Right Textbook
Every summer, some non-insignificant subset of us decides that it is time to change casebooks. Our reasons for doing so vary, but most of us choose to make a change because we believe the book we have chosen does not adequately support our teaching goals and methods. Others of us are teaching a new course…
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2024 Norwegian Brain Scan Study Shows the Value of Students Writing by Hand
F R Ruud Van der Weel and Audrey L H Van der Meer, Handwriting but not typewriting leads to widespread brain connectivity: a high-density EEG study with implications for the classroom The abstract below shares the key takeaways from the study. For law teachers, the study suggests that, if we can get our students to take notes…
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Hemingway: The Case for Kindness: Gender, Pedagogy, and Power in Legal Education
Anna P. Hemingway (Widener), The Case for Kindness: Gender, Pedagogy, and Power in Legal Education, 35 Kan. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 1 (2025). The abstract of this important teaching article explains the authors argument. Abstract Kindness is undervalued in legal education. It is too often treated as incompatible with rigor or professionalism and it is…
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Teaching Tidbit of the Week: Set Great Teaching Goals This Summer
My friends and colleagues have frequently characterized me as overly optimistic, a quality that saw its apex in my approach to planning my summer projects. I always imagined producing multiple articles and completing overhauls of all the courses I would be teaching in the next school year. Thanks to the google machine, I now know…
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Cult of Pedagogy: PD is Getting So Much Better!!
Jennifer Gonzalez (Cult of Pedagogy), PD is Getting So Much Better!! (March 4, 2018). With the rapid change to the NextGen Bar Exam (even California seem to be moving that way!), law professors and deans have started thinking hard about how to provide Professional Development (PD) for faculty as we change our teaching and assessment…
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Teaching Tidbit: End Your Classes with Style
As we get close to the end of the semester, it is worth a moment to consider how you would like to end your spring classes. As a student, I never liked lukewarm goodbyes like “I see our time for today is up. Good luck on the final!” An ideal end of the course brings…
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Faculty Focus: Why Students Ignore Feedback and Tips to Fix It!
Dr. Julia Colella (Faculty Focus), Why Students Ignore Feedback and Tips to Fix It!, April 13, 2026 According to Mather and Scheepers (2025), providing students with feedback is one of the most important aspects for teaching and learning. However, it is not uncommon for students to avoid engaging with feedback, even when instructors invest significant time in providing detailed comments. Written/typed feedback is often overlooked,…
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Teaching Tidbit of the Week: Navigating the Dog Days of the Spring Semester
I begin this post from the premise that law teachers have the best job imaginable. We have reasonable teaching loads compared, for example, to our undergraduate liberal arts colleagues, and we get to teach adult students who, for the most part, come to us motivated and willing to work hard. Nevertheless, about this time of…
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Edutopia: Effective Ways to Facilitate PD for Teacher Growth
Kasey Short (Edutopia), Effective Ways to Facilitate PD for Teacher Growth: To help teachers realize their potential, school leaders can create systems that provide relevant feedback, encouragement, and new learning opportunities (April 7, 2026) One topic that is underdeveloped in legal education is creation of systems for professional teaching development for faculty. While many law…
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Ed Week: Dear Administrators: Here Are 7 Things Teachers Want You to Know
Madeline Will (Education Week), Dear Administrators: Here Are 7 Things Teachers Want You to Know (May 24, 2023) In this short essay, a K-12 teacher identified seven things teachers want their administrators to know. As a former administrator returning to full-time teaching, all seven resonate, although they play out differently in law schools. The article…
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Teaching Tidbit of the Week: How to Own Your Mistakes
This posting focuses on best practices when, inevitably, we make mistakes when we are teaching. In the category of mistakes, I include: allowing typos to go uncorrected on exams and other assessment-related errors, misstating the law or the analysis of a hypothetical, forgetting or mispronouncing a student’s name, implementing a new (or even time-tested) teaching…