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Education Dive
Legal reasoning skills can help students see issues from multiple sides
Lauren Barack@Llauren
June 26, 2019
Dive Brief:
Writers Michael J. Broyde, a professor of law at Emory Law School, and
Ira Bedzow, the director of the Biomedical Ethics and Humanities
Program at New York Medical College, write in an Education Week piece
that legal reasoning skills should be taught alongside comprehension
and reading in K-12 schools.
The two believe that integrating legal thinking into the classroom,
particularly at a young age, helps children develop skills to work
productively through concerns, rather than react when presented with
arguments where they don’t agree.
Legal reasoning may help boost students' ability to look at multiple
sides of an argument, and how they approach their own schoolwork:
understanding there isn’t always one solution, one answer or one point
of view.
Dive Insight:
Increasing civic engagement among students has been a growing focus for
schools and districts. The New York City Department of Education, for
example is allowing students to have a say in how they would spend
$2,000 of their school's budget as a way to bring them into the
educational process directly. While some teachers have found success by
weaving direct civic engagement into their curriculum, even changing
the law as a result, experts have found that in most classrooms across
the U.S., civics education is waning.
Educators who want to make small shifts toward adding civic
involvement, or add lessons that encourage this behavior, may want to
look at opportunities online. Free resources are available from
respected organizations including Khan Academy, iCivics, founded by
Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, and the Bill of Right Institute, which
pulls from primary sources including the U.S. Constitution.
Administrators and curriculum leaders can also encourage civics
education by supporting and sponsoring extracurricular programs, such
as debate, journalism and Model United Nations programs. Besides
sparking engagement, debate programs have been shown to have an impact,
in particular, on high-risk students by helping to boost their chances
of graduating from high school, and being more prepared for college.
Debate programs, which can be found in both middle and high schools,
also help teach students to look at both sides of an argument, and
examine the details of an issue rather than seeing it through the lens
of one position being right and another wrong. This ability, to
consider the nuances of an issue, is one students can carry with them
throughout life.
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