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1 J.L. Teaching & Learning 1 (2024)

handle is hein.journals/jnlolwtch1 and id is 1 raw text is: 




THE      YEAR        OF     MAGICAL         TEACHING:
LESSONS LEARNED FROM ONE CLASS IN
THREE MODALITIES

By Debra  Moss  Vollweiler*

   This  article narrates eight key  lessons learned  by  an
experienced law professor teaching one course in three different
ways  during one academic year. During the 2021-2022 academic
year, I taught one course-Secured Transactions-three times, for
three different schools, and in three different modalities. While I
certainly do not stand alone in self-reflecting on my teaching
during recent times,1 in the recent year I had a unique situation
that allowed me to isolate and consider my teaching of a subject,
away  from preparing the doctrine of the subject itself.
   Although  thinking about teaching historically was not the
focus of law professors in legal education, there has been a slow
steady change in the interest of the discipline of teaching among
legal educators.2 It is clear that reports on legal education in the
past twenty years reawakened  interest in innovative ways to
educate lawyers, including the release of the Carnegie Foundation
for the Advancement of Teaching's comprehensive study of legal
education and  the Clinical Legal Education Association 'Best
Practices for Legal Education.'3 Such excellent, thorough works
clearly kick-started the modern pedagogy conversation.
   Articles on reform in legal education then debuted with more
frequency in the wake of the recession in the late 2000s-and the
subsequent drop in enrollment for many law schools.4 At the time,


*Debra Moss Vollweiler is a Professor of Law at Nova Southeastern
University, Shepard Broad College of Law in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
During the writing of this article, she was a visiting professor for the
Elisabeth Haub School of Law at Pace University in White Plains, New
York, during the winter and at least one blizzard. Warm thanks to Adam
Benitez, NSU 2022, for his research assistance, and to the library staff
at both NSU and Haub Law.
1 Amy Soled, How COVID-19 Made Me a Better Teacher, 34 THE SECOND
DRAFT 1 (Aug. 2021); Timothy Casey, Reflections on Legal Education in
the Aftermath of a Pandemic, 28 CLINICAL L. REV. 85 (Aug. 23, 2021).
2 Brent E. Newton, The Ninety-Five Theses: Systematic Reforms of
American Legal Education and Licensure, 64 S.C. L. REV. 55 (2012).
3 Deborah Jones Merritt, Pedagogy, Progress, and Portfolios, 25 OHIO ST.
J. DISP. RESOL. 7, (2009).
4 Newton, supra note 2.