Lessons in Pedagogy: My Experience with Problem-Based Learning

This Article chronicles my experimental adoption of Problem-Based Learning (PBL) in first-year Contracts. After three decades of conventional teaching, I observed that Gen Z students struggled to transition from undergraduate memorization strategies to law school-level analytical reasoning, prompting my desire to engage in a fundamental pedagogical change. Drawing on successful PBL implementations in medical and mathematics education, I restructured my Contracts course around collaborative problem-solving in small groups, transforming my role from lecturer to facilitator. Students worked through authentic legal scenarios at whiteboards, developing rule-based reasoning through active engagement rather than passive reception.

This article first details my reasons for adopting PBL in my 1L classroom. It then offers the reader a detailed explanation of how I adopted the program for my classroom. Finally, it provides the reader with a fair assessment of both the positives and negatives of my experience teaching exclusively through the PBL method. I argue that pure PBL, despite its demands on faculty and initial student resistance, better serves contemporary legal education's core mission in light of the kinds of students learning today.

The methodology aligns with both the MacCrate Report's call for practice-oriented learning and the NextGen Bar's emphasis on analytical application over memorization. My candid assessment offers fellow legal educators both inspiration and cautionary guidance for implementing PBL, while ultimately advocating resistance to "evaluations fetishism" when student preferences conflict with demonstrably superior pedagogical approaches for developing practice-ready lawyers