MAILING LISTS

Although I am the only faculty member at my law school who uses TBL, I am
hoping to spread TBL throughout the first-year curriculum.

At our law school, all first-year students take the same classes and have
the same classmates in all of their casebook classes. The only exception is
Legal Methods, which is an analysis and writing class. Legal Methods is a
smaller class; the first-year students are divided  into 3-5 Legal Methods
sections, depending on the size of the first-year class. Only the first
year is structured this way. The second-year and third-year students choose
their own classes and make their own schedules.

Given that the first-year students are with the same people all day, all
semester, I'm wondering which is the best way to use teams under these
circumstances. I can think of two major options.

First option--each professor creates his or her own teams. This means that
students would switch from one team to another as they went from class to
class during the week. This means that their teamates in Legal Methods
class would probably be on other teams in other classes.

Second option--we assign teams in each Legal Methods class and then use
those same teams in all other first-year classes that use TBL that
semester. (Of course, this would require the agreement of all of the
first-year professors who use TBL.) This means that students are on the
same team in all of their classes where the professor uses TBL.

I can think of benefits and detriments to both options. Have any of you
faced this situation and, if so, how did you resolve it? How did your
solution work? What did students think of it?

Thanks for any advice you can offer.

-----------------
David Raeker-Jordan
Legal Methods Professor
Widener University School of Law
Harrisburg, PA
717.541.1996