Adapting Law Lectures to Maximise Student Engagement: Is It Time to 'Transform'?

Abstract

Technological advances have undoubtedly brought significant benefits to students in higher education. Classes can be recorded for students who are unable to attend, communication between students and staff can be facilitated more easily online, and web-based tools and resources improve learning and university efficiency. However, this has not come without a cost. Class attendance has long been considered a significant issue in higher education, and has dramatically declined in the past decade. This is especially prominent in lectures, which have traditionally focused on information transfer from an instructor to their students without requiring students to think critically or respond. This is in contrast to tutorials and other workshop-style classes that are heavily problem solving-based. As Huff notes, this traditional style of lecturing often leads only to undeveloped information transfer from the lecturer to the student ‘without passing through the brains of either’. In such circumstances, lecture recordings capture most important information that students require, with significant resulting impact on attendance rates. In a study of a psychology class, Grabe, Christopherson, and Douglas found that 61 per cent of voluntary absences from class can be attributed to the availability of online lecture notes. A University of Western Australia (UWA) study conducted by Mascher and Skead found that 80 per cent of students attend classes because they do not want to miss something not picked up on a recording or because a class is not recorded. Dwindling student attendance is a major teaching and learning concern of higher education institutions worldwide. For many years, studies have shown that low attendance rates result in a significantly less effective teaching and learning environment. Higher student attendance directly corresponds with more positive student evaluation of teachers, and with higher grades and deeper learning. Collett, Gyles, and Hrasky found that a class taught fully online had significantly lower performance on multiple-choice tests when compared to a class taught through a combination of online and in- class instruction. Furthermore, if lectures fail to engage students or even draw them to the university campus, then this will have significantly adverse implications for traditional campus-based universities in an increasingly globalised, online, and competitive higher education market. Law schools face their own particular challenges, too. Law students are expected to develop the skills to critically interpret, apply, analyse, and comment on legal issues and principles. However the traditional, ‘one-way’ information transfer style of lecturing is far more adept to rote learning than to developing skills in critical analysis. How, then, can universities respond to this problem? One solution is shifting to ‘transformative’ teaching, whereby students’ learning and experience is ‘transformed’ and dynamic relationships between teachers, students, and a shared body of knowledge are created in order to promote student learning and personal growth. Transformative teaching and learning has its roots in the late-twentieth century, but has achieved significant traction in higher education literature in the past 10 years. Transformative teaching methods are designed to substantially increase student engagement and interest through transforming, or altering, students’ outlook or learning styles. As lectures, the most fundamental educational tool in legal education, ordinarily contain few transformative aspects, this style of class is ripe for such transformation. This article outlines an empirical study of students, staff, and executives at the UWA Law School to determine preferences for transformative teaching techniques and how they would best improve engagement and enjoyment in a lecture environment. Through a mix of student-centred learning, problem-based learning and active learning, an adaption of lectures to include more transformative techniques will be proposed — a formative resuscitation that would not go as far as King’s suggestion in the 1970s of a ‘radical departure from the normal type of classroom teaching’. This exploratory process will assist law schools, and indeed other university faculties, in improving attendance, engagement, and learning outcomes in lectures, with the aim of contemporising and helping transform student experiences at university. An emphasis on transformative teaching will also provide support for the continued use of ‘small seminar-style’ classes that are already utilised in many Australian law schools. Following an examination of relevant transformative teaching literature in Part II and a brief methodological outline in Part III, results of the study are analysed in Part IV and a set of key recommendations for law lectures proposed in Part V.