Interactive class exercises

Interactive class exercises are designed to reinforce concepts from lectures and readings. They may test students’ intuitions about concepts that are familiar from lived experience and also subject to philosophical investigation, such as killing or disease. In other cases in-class exercises are used to test whether students understand a concept or theory discussed in class well enough to apply it to new cases. This is exemplified by exercises exploring Hart’s distinction between primary and secondary rules, testing students’ understanding of Austin’s theory of law, or determining whether students have grasped the corollary nature of rights and duties and can guess what duties are correlated to which rights.

Case-based discussion

Many of my courses also make major use of case-based discussion. Some courses–like Health Care Ethics–include teaching case-based reasoning as a major course objective. In this class we often begin informally with short cases presented in class before moving on to formal case presentations of major historical cases like Willowbrook, followed by analysis in groups using methods discussed in class. This helps prepare students for their case-based projects due later in the semester. In other classes, like Philosophy of Law, I use cases to introduce major themes for the class (see R. v Dudley and Stephens) or to illustrate important ideas about a class topic, such as the role of morality in legal reasoning (see Riggs). After reading the case students are assigned to groups to discuss selected analytical questions, and then we reconvene as a class for a guided discussion involving everyone.

Writing workshops

All of my courses now feature writing workshops designed to help students improve arguments, outlines, or drafts of term papers. These writing workshops are an integral part of the scaffolding of assignments. However, they also leverage class time by giving students the opportunity to learn from each other and also get direct verbal feedback from me prior to submitting a final draft. Typically I ask students to work in pairs for this assignment. They trade papers and answer a series of questions about their partner’s paper. These questions reflect the final rubric I use to grade their completed work.