Paul L. Caron
Dean
Pepperdine Caruso
School of Law
Teaching
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Legal Education’s Greatest Hits Revisited
The editors of the Journal of Legal Education, now housed at UCIrvine and New York Law School, had the great idea of inviting today’s law faculty members to look back on some of the most influential articles published in the JLE over the past 40 years. These reflections are collected in a forthcoming double issue,…
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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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Law Professors Prefer AI Answers
In a rigorous study aimed at determining whether AI has progressed to where it can navigate the sort of critical thinking required for legal education Stanford Law Professor Julian Nyarko, along with co-authors, Yale Law Professor Sarath Sanga and Stanford Liftlab’s Researcher, Alenjandro Salinas, have reached some potentially unsettling conclusions. Using a clever research design,…
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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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The Stories Behind the Cases
In a forthcoming article in the Journal of Legal Education, St John’s Professor Ashley B. Armstrong offers a systematic approach to what has long been understood as a gap in traditional law school courses. Presenting what she calls “the contextual case method”, Professor Armstrong doesn’t merely highlight the importance of expanding case analysis to include…
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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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UC Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Policy
Last last week, just before the Memorial Day weekend, news broke that the faculty of the UC Berkeley School of Law have adopted an “Artificial Intelligence Policy” applicable to Berkeley Law students – but not to the faculty itself. The policy itself is here. In a nutshell, the policy established a “students may not use…
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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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This round to the profs, BUT??
The Boston Globe tells the story of tenured medical school professors at Tufts who prevailed in a lawsuit against the university, arguing that changes to the terms and conditions of their employment were not consistent with the academic tenure the profs had earned and been promised. But the story explains how the tenure system nationwide…
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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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“Why Students Struggle With the Basics”
I am catching up on an essay from April, titled “Why Students Struggle With the Basics,” by University of Texas History professor and prolific Substacker Steven Mintz. His focus is undergraduates. Law professors know that population as “law students of the near future.” He explores answers (plural) to his framing question: “[W]hy are so many…
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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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What if 1Ls Won’t Read?
In a recent article in the Nebraska Law Review, University of Oregon Clinical Professor Elizabeth Ruiz Frost asks a question that should make us all take notice. Reading is Dead: Can Law Schools Make Lawyers from Non-Readers?, 104 Neb. L. Rev. 293 (2025). After thoroughly documenting and rightly decrying the decline in overall reading skills in…
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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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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,…