In Case You Are Interested: Writing the Business Law Weekly Reviews

This is the approach I take when I write my reviews. While the professor writing for your discipline may take a slightly different approach, I think we all share the same goals and follow a similar path. I scour the week's worth of papers, looking for at least three good business law articles. My goal is to find articles that discuss current hot topics that would also add to the discussion in some area covered in business law classes. Sometimes I can find a long article detailing the history of a law, a current event, or an area of law. Other articles may be short but offer a great basis for discussion of an interesting point. My favorites are ones that offer an interesting story to engage the students.

I frequently print out 10 or more articles to narrow it down to the most appropriate ones. I write a summary of the article so that the professor can skim the summary and decide if he or she would like to read the entire article. It is much shorter than the article, but details the main points.

My strategy for writing questions loosely follows the theory of Blooms Taxonomy. The taxonomy includes six levels of learning: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. I try to structure my collection of questions so that it covers most or all of these levels. Some of my questions require only recall of the information offered in the article to see if the students read and understood it. Other questions reach to higher levels of learning, asking the student for the reasons behind the information offered in the article. Finally, I frequently write questions that push beyond the article and ask them to apply the information - lessons learned, ripple effects of the event described in the article. This range of questions help to test the degree of student understanding, as well as train students to think beyond just the facts offered. As a result, the article becomes a mini-case study.