Measuring teaching effectiveness: transformative learning in legal education

Abstract

One of the ways of measuring teaching effectiveness is by looking at student grades and checking whether institutional attainment rates for student satisfaction have been met. However, to what extent do grades reflect teaching effectiveness or learner competence in modern legal education? With the advent of AI, teaching technologies, a changing world of work, and in light of a global pandemic, Covid-19, that has demanded changes to how we teach and assess students, how much guarantee can we give on the future prospects of a graduate, based only on their academic grades? This paper draws from the transformative learning theory and posits that incorporating a learner-centred approach to teaching, by contrast to the strict teacher-centred approach in traditional legal education, is essential for preparing law students for life and work, after university.