Small Teaching Transactional Skills in the Legal Writing Classroom

Abstract

Calls to increase the teaching of transactional skills, including transactional drafting skills, have continued to amplify in recent years. Although many law schools have addressed this need in upper-level courses, clinics, and concentrations, law schools can do more to address this need in the first year curriculum, including in the first year Legal Writing course.

This article asserts that Legal Writing professors can address this need in the first year curriculum by introducing transactional skills through small teaching. Small teaching is a teaching technique rooted in the learning sciences that focuses on making small strategic changes to the syllabus in order to introduce small-scale low stakes exercises and examples. Using small teaching techniques to introduce transactional skills, professors need not recreate their course, but can instead achieve the goal of integrating transactional skills into objective and persuasive assignments while also reaping the proven student-oriented learning benefits of small teaching.