Translation, not imitation: what legal educators can learn from schools

Teaching is something of a family profession in our household. My dad was a primary school headteacher, my mum was a head of department and teacher in further education, and my sisters teach in primary and secondary education. You can probably imagine the scene around the dining-room table: conversations about lesson plans, reluctant learners, brilliant activities, difficult classes, and the occasional spirited disagreement about what counts as “good teaching” and who has it harder.

When I became a lecturer in 2017, I was surprised that teaching approaches commonly used in schools were sometimes viewed negatively in a university setting. Structured and participatory activities were described, not always approvingly, as “too PGCert”: too carefully designed, too heavily facilitated and, occasionally, too much fun to be considered sufficiently substantial. Perhaps this reflects how we imagine university teaching, with the lecturer as specialist, the student as adult, and the work as advanced and intellectually rigorous. Against that backdrop, an activity that looks playful, colourful, or highly structured is often dismissed before we consider what it is actually asking students to do.

Yet, to borrow a saying many of us first learned at primary school, we should not judge a book by its cover. A lesson involving movement, conversation, or a creatively designed task may look less serious than a lecture or traditional seminar discussion, but that does not mean the intellectual work beneath it is less demanding. An activity may require learners to research unfamiliar material, distinguish between competing ideas, identify what matters, communicate it clearly, respond to questions, and revise their understanding. Fun and substance are not opposites. An activity can be enjoyable precisely because students are actively engaged in a challenging process.

This deserves attention because many of the intellectual processes developed through school activities remain central to legal education. The Law Subject Benchmark Statement emphasises critical thinking, evaluation, problem-solving, and communication, while across the national curriculum learners are also asked to reason, compare, justify, and evaluate. The level, context and disciplinary demands are clearly different, but the processes themselves do not become irrelevant when a student enters university. The challenge is therefore to separate the purpose of an activity from the form in which it first appears.

Consider the “marketplace” activity used in school teaching. Groups research different parts of a topic and create a market stall from which they share what they have learned. Some students remain at the stall to explain their findings, while others visit the rest of the marketplace, gather information and return to teach it to their group. On the surface, the activity may appear informal, perhaps even theatrical, but beneath that surface students are researching, selecting, synthesising, explaining, questioning, and taking responsibility for one another’s learning.

Those processes have an obvious place in legal education, but the school activity cannot simply be copied and pasted into a law seminar. Transferred unchanged, even a valuable activity may feel patronising, artificial, or disconnected from the discipline. That is a legitimate concern, but it is an argument for thoughtful adaptation rather than for dismissing the approach altogether. The answer is not imitation, but translation.

Translation begins by asking three questions: what intellectual process sits beneath the activity, where does that process arise in legal learning, and how can the activity be redesigned for the students, subject, and level of study in front of us? The marketplace might, for example, become a client-interview carousel or a legal networking fair. Different groups could examine judgments, statutory provisions, or competing perspectives on a contested issue before deciding what others genuinely need to understand. Students moving between groups might be required not simply to collect information, but to identify tensions between authorities, record points of uncertainty, and return to their original group to construct a reasoned position or advise a client.

The translated activity would retain the research, synthesis, peer explanation, and shared responsibility of the original, while introducing the ambiguity, authority, and contestability that characterise legal reasoning. It might look very different from the school activity that inspired it, but that is not a weakness. What has been transferred is not the activity itself, but its underlying purpose.

The best dining-room-table conversations in my family are rarely about copying exactly what somebody else has done. They are about understanding what made an idea work, identifying what it enabled learners to do, and wondering what it might look like in another classroom. School teaching does not provide ready-made activities that can simply be imported into legal education. It offers something more valuable: an invitation to reconsider what intellectually rigorous teaching can look like.

_{Feature image: Photo by Dom Fou on Unsplash. Public domain.}