My mission as a teacher is to enable my students to learn joyfully, read carefully, think clearly, and write well.

Read Carefully

While we are told that reading is fundamental, we are not often consciously attending to ways of deepening our skill at it. I try to present my students with some new approaches to reading challenging or provocative material and getting the most out of it.

Inductive Reading This method of reading seeks to amplify the voice of a text by attending to a number of particular textual elements that convey meaning. It is particularly useful for familiar or controversial texts that we want to enable to speak for themselves.

Briefing Cases One of the first skills that law students have to acquire is the ability to brief a case. This process teaches a budding lawyers how to discern the core issues and principles that determine the outcome of a particular case and govern how future cases will be decided.

Lectio Divina Developed centuries ago in monastic practice, this method of reading is almost the exact opposite of modern speed reading. Literally "divine reading," this is a form of meditation that brings practitioners into a more profound engagement with the text and calls them into a tangible application of the deeper wisdom present in the material.