SPIRALS AND SCHEMAS: HOW INTEGRATED LAW SCHOOL COURSES CREATE HIGHER-ORDER THINKERS AND PROBLEM SOLVERS

As legal educators continue to shift focus to preparing students for practice, they should put integrated first-year courses and curricula into the top tier of potential reform vehicles. Integration refers to the extent to which a course or curriculum blurs disciplinary boundaries as well as boundaries between doctrine and authentic learning activities. Integrated courses promote active, deep learning that facilitate orderly knowledge construction and reveal more connections between vital legal concepts. The authenticity of integrated courses improves students’ retention and transfer of knowledge. Such accessible, interconnected knowledge in such a vital learning environment is like intellectual rocket fuel to law students as they hone higher-order thinking and problem-solving capacities, especially those emerging from sixteen years of passive education. Best of all, integration brings all of these elements into the doctrinal classroom where they belong. The article starts with established learning theory about how and what students learn to explain why the traditional first-year curriculum is inadequate to many students’ needs and schools’ practice-oriented missions. It then provides a high overview of what is meant by “integrated courses and curricula” and what they can and should achieve pedagogically. After zooming in, the article shows what particular integrated curricula, courses and activities that law schools could insert into their catalogs and syllabi today would look like. Finally, the article examines both anecdotal evidence and scholarly studies of outcomes from students educated with an integrated curriculum. The article concludes optimistically that integrated first-year courses and activities have enough potential to make transformative pedagogical improvements in legal education that they to demand further consideration as a framework for reform