A new article was posted on SSRN last month by Jennifer Bard from Texas Tech University School of Law entitled Addressing the Challenge of Teaching Skills in Today’s Law Schools: How Medical Schools Used to Have the Same Problems We Do and What We Can Learn from Their Efforts to Solve Them.
Here is a piece of the abstract:
The purpose of this article was to provide resources for law school faculty members who want to integrate the skills of the practicing lawyer into today’s law school classroom by providing information about how medical schools have approached a similar task. In the last ten years, medical schools have been working to change a culture where skills were learned by observation and modeling into one where skills are taught intentionally and consistently starting in the first two years of medical school. This represents a significant change because even as medical school curriculum has evolved and changed over the past twenty-five years these pre-clinical years had focused on the acquisition of knowledge about the human body, not clinical skills. It has tried to present this information in the context of some significant differences between the resources available to medical schools which make the task of teaching skills earlier in the curriculum easier than the task will be for law schools. These advantages include a faculty which possesses current clinical skills and an extended period of subsidized apprenticeship.
Give the article a read and let us know what you think!
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