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When we first met at the lecture theatre at the beginning of the semester,
I sensed resistance and tension among the students I was tasked to teach
a Property Law module. I found their reticence unsettling. In my years
of teaching the module, I had not faced such a difficult ‘audience’.
Apparently, they had had a negative first encounter with another Law
module the previous year. When queried, the students identified various
reasons for their apparent dislike of the subject:
I realised that the students seemed to have a motivation problem,
blaming everyone but themselves. I was determined to overcome these obstacles:
I wanted my students to enjoy their learning and be interested in this
module. If the students continued to be haunted by their previous experience
and I did not address their resistance, there would be losers all round:
the students would suffer; I would be dissatisfied. The learning experience
I wished for them to have in my module would not be realised.
An uphill task lay ahead for me. But appearing somewhat confident, I
said to them, “Well, this time round it is going to be
different; I assure you, by the time this module is over, you will love
the subject”. I received sceptical looks in response.
The Expectancy-Value Theory of Motivation
Research (Biggs, 1999) showed that two factors make students (or anyone)
want to learn something:
In other words, in order to teach this lot effectively, it was
even more critical that I pay attention to setting up an appropriate
teaching/learning context. This way, students would have every encouragement
to react with the level of cognitive engagement that [my] objectives required
(Biggs, 1999).
Several weeks before the start of the semester when I had been preparing
my Subject Programme, it had been pretty clear in my mind what my objectives
were for the module. Now, I paused to think: What indeed, were my
objectives for this batch of Level 2 Students for this module?
I realised that I would have to tweak my earlier proclaimed objectives
(by now already printed and issued). These included knowing what the
law is (Petter, 1982), understanding why it is that way, applying
it to situations before them and within the bigger scheme of things, taking
into account the other modules they were taking. Bearing in mind Bloom’s
taxonomy (Bloom, 1956), I decided that I would pay particular attention
to application, as this would in turn require ‘engagement’.
The triggers for such ‘engagement’ would be the channels I
could easily provide, e.g. framing topics for thought and discussion in
innovative ways. There were endless forums I could use—during tutorials
at scheduled times, during lectures (albeit to a lesser extent), on the
IVLE discussion forum, via email, or even in corridors. Hopefully, this
would motivate the students to learn.
Thus for example, I would start off discussion on a legal issue in the
simplest of terms by asking:
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“Did you read in the papers this morning about the old man
who was being asked by some of his children to leave his home? He
insisted that although he had no legal title, he had a right to continue
living in the house because he was the one who paid for it.
Would you do that to your father?
-
“What would you do if your neighbour carried out some major
renovation works and as a result caused subsidence (and damage) to
your garden and collection of orchids?”
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“Ever see four houses in a row which are all identical in design
and painted pink?”
I could make choices on how to formulate the issues in a structured
manner for elaborate case studies. I could pop questions when the moment
seemed right during a discussion as an add-on to what a student had already
contributed in class. I could even end a class by raising issues to provide
students with food for thought after the class. These were just some of
the ways I tried to engage students: by getting them to think about real-life
problems and then only drawing them back to the legal issues and principles
which would determine how a dispute may be settled.
So How Did I Do?
Quite honestly, I don’t know—at the time of writing this
article, the Student Feedback Evaluations were not yet available. However,
there has been much evidence through various forms of informal communication
and feedback that the students have changed their mind about Law:
‘challenging’, ‘stimulating’, ‘thought-provoking’
and even ‘enjoyable’ were some of the words students
had used. From my point of view, I was satisfied—I believe I had
them ‘hooked’ and hopefully, this would contribute in some
way to their life-long learning. I was happiest when I received students’
email messages such as this: “Ma’am, the other day while I
was riding in the bus on the way home, I spotted a residential development
with a shared but damaged carpark. I thought about we had discussed in
class that morning and went home and read up more about it.”
I could now appreciate more deeply what Shuell (1986) meant when he
wrote:
If students are to learn desired outcomes in a reasonably
effective manner, then the teacher’s fundamental task is to get
students to engage in learning activities that are likely to result
in their achieving those outcomes; it is helpful to remember that what
the student does is actually more important in determining what is learned
than what the teacher does.
References
Biggs, John. (1999). Teaching for Quality Learning
at University: What the Student Does. Buckingham: Society for Research
into Higher Education and Open University Press.
Petter, A. (1982). ‘A Closet within a House: Learning
Objectives and the Law School Curriculum’, Chapter 5 in A. Petter,
Essays in Legal Education. Butterworths, Ontario, Canada.
Bloom, B.S. (1956). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives,
Handbook I: Cognitive Domain. Longman: London.
Shuell, T.J. (1986). ‘Cognitive Conceptions of
Learning’, Review of Education Research, Vol. 56, pp. 411–36.
As cited in Biggs, John. (1999). Teaching for quality learning at
university: What the student does. Buckingham: Society for Research
into Higher Education and Open University Press.
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