Civil Procedure: An Active Learning Approach

This title is a part of our CasebookPlus™ offering as ISBN 9798892092159. Learn more at Faculty-CasebookPlus.com.

This book incorporates modern pedagogy principles and active learning. It employs a directed reading approach to flip every class session resulting in higher student readiness and doctrinal understanding. Alternative contextualization, spaced repetition and interleaving are employed in every lesson to facilitate student cognitive schema formation. Active learning exercises result in students reading the rules more carefully and creating deeper and more meaningful context for the rules they are learning than when using traditional, passive casebooks. Formative assessment is continuous and expertly incorporated into the book’s structure such that students continuously receive extensive feedback about their learning without any extra labor expenditure on the professor’s part. Because active learning at its core, is a constructivist pedagogy that recognizes student learning is achieved through engagement with content rather than hierarchical delivery of information, every chapter in this book and the accompanying directed reading questions are carefully designed discovery sequence exercises that result in deep and efficient understanding of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure and the cases interpreting those rules in significantly fewer pages than is possible with traditional casebooks. Finally, the book is deliberately designed to be used in both the traditional law school classroom and in the synchronous or asynchronous online setting if the professor chooses to use online instruction rather than traditional face to face instruction methods.

The teacher’s manual is designed so that even teachers unfamiliar with civil procedure can use only the casebook and teacher’s manual to expertly teach the subject while seamlessly employing modern pedagogy. The teacher’s manual also leaves room for experienced teachers to do this while facilitating optional doctrinal nuance development in response to the directed reading questions.

It is critical for potential adopters to review both the book and the teacher’s manual together when evaluating this title for use in your class. The teacher’s manual can be accessed under the Teaching Resources link to the left.

Read more about this book’s active learning approach here.

Watch our recent webinar with author Rory Bahadur.

Student Evaluations of Directed Reading Course
Civil Procedure Fall 2022 Evaluations
Civil Procedure Spring 2023 Evaluations

Learn more about the Directed Reading Method in the article below:

Bahadur, Rory D. and Franklin, Kris, DIRECTED QUESTIONS A NON-SOCRATIC DIALOGUE ABOUT NON-SOCRATIC TEACHING (August 16, 2021). University of Detroit Mercy Law Review, Vol. 99, No. 1, 2021,
Available at SSRN: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3906154

Imprint: West Academic Publishing
Series: American Casebook Series
Publication Date: 04/10/2024