Lawyers and Learning: A Metacognitive Approach to Legal Education

This article will detail the concept of metacognition, how current law school teaching does not teach metacognitive skills, and how legal educators can incorporate metacognitive learning into the law school curriculum to help students better transfer knowledge and skills to the practice of law. Teaching metacognitive skills to law students should focus on explaining learning theory and modeling appropriate planning, monitoring, and evaluating techniques across the curriculum. Part II of this article details how law schools have been slow to integrate and apply learning theory to the law school classroom. Part III details the theory behind metacognition and how it differs from cognitive learning. Part IV explains how metacognition can be incorporated into the curriculum by first making students aware of their own cognitive abilities, learning preferences, and past academic experiences. This section will also detail how adult learners bring different strengths and weaknesses to law school, making the teaching of learning sometimes easier and sometimes harder. Part V will detail which cognitive skills are taught in law school and required of a lawyer. This section emphasizes the need to fully and explicitly teach the different types of reasoning required of a lawyer, which most students leave law school without fully understanding. Finally, Part VI details how law professors need to model appropriate metacognitive skills and learning across the law school curriculum in order to foster the transfer of cognitive legal skills to new situations and problems. This section also gives several suggestions on how to use technology to foster more effective metacognitive learning