Food For Thought: Best Practices and ABA Standards

Posted on November 17, 2010 by Irene Scharf

An argument has been made by some, who oppose what they view as forced imposition of Best Practices instruction, that this practice  violates academic freedom mandated by ABA Rule 405(b) ( “A law school shall have an established and announced policy with respect to academic freedom ..).  This argument raises some questions:  Does encouraging integration in the “doctrinal” curriculum of law-practice skills and other approaches to the classroom encouraged by Best Practices and the recent Carnegie Report violate academic freedom? Does evaluating teaching based on use of the teaching methods encouraged by those Reports violate these freedoms?

ABA Rule 403(b) provides that “[a] law school shall ensure effective teaching by all persons providing instruction to students.”  “Effective teaching” as used here is not defined.  What does the ABA mean by it?  Is it the pure Socratic method? Is it “stressing” students so that they fear their experience in the law classroom?  The authors of both the Best Practices Book and the recent Carnegie Report thought not.  Both found that effective teaching encompasses a broader and more holistic approach to students and the classroom.

To take the argument to the extreme, if the traditional Socratic method of teaching is NOT effective, can it be said that Socratic teaching to the exclusion of other methods constitutes ineffective teaching, and thus actually violates 403(b)?

Food for thought.

Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum | 1 Comment »

ABA Curriculum Survey

Posted on November 14, 2010 by Antoinette Sedillo Lopez

The 2004 ABA Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar curriculum survey revealed a dramatic increase in clinical and legal skills programs. I am on the ABA Curriculum Committee and we are again surveying law schools about their curriculum. The survey has some new questions and some reframing of questions to get more detailed and specific information. This will tell us how schools are progressing on Best Practices. Please encourage your law school to participate in the survey as soon as possible!

This survey will track changes in legal education since the last edition was published in 2004, including detailed empirical information on such topics as: requirements for graduation, first-year curriculum, elective offerings, concentrations, and post- and non-J.D. degrees.

This second edition of the Survey also addresses academic support and bar preparation classes and alternative scheduling options, and provides detailed information on legal research and writing courses and professional skills offerings. This report will provide valuable information about legal education in America today, and comprehensive participation ensures both the validity of data and strength of information found within it.

The survey should be submitted it to the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar by December 15, 2010. Instructions are easy to follow, and the survey should take no more than 45 minutes.

The Curriculum Survey can be accessed at http://www.curriculumsurvey.org/. Instructions for accessing and navigating the survey, including information regarding UserID and password for your school can be found on the Section’s home page: http://www.abanet.org/legaled.

Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Catalysts For Change, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Monsters in the Closet: My Fears about Curricular Reform

Posted on October 13, 2010 by Nancy Cook

When the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching had the good sense to publish its report, Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law (William Sullivan, Anne Colby, Judith Wegner, Lloyd Bond, Lee Shulman, 2007) on the heels of Best Practices for Legal Education (Roy Stuckey and Others, 2007), I was among those rejoicing. The two volumes speak volumes about legal education, and the academy was taking notice. Two great leaps forward for legal education! Now I find myself in a hubbub of workshopping and consulting with hundreds of others engaged in renovations, innovations, and reforms. Can the tipping point be far behind? Isn’t this a dream come true?

But as the initial euphoria wears off, I discover a few anxieties interfering with the dream.

Monsters in the Closet.
All changes and new beginnings carry risks, and the risks I see in the future of legal education take on the forms of familiar monsters. I’ve dubbed them Discoverers, Crusaders, and Regressives.

Discoverers. This doesn’t sound in monsterness, but here’s how I think of it: In lots of gatherings where curricular change is discussed, I hear things that suggest that experiential education is something that has just appeared out of the mists. At one gathering, for example, Harvard’s first-year Problem Solving Workshop – a three-week course in which classes of 80 students work through seven fact patterns – was presented as a “radical” innovation, a “revolution” in law school pedagogy. (See HLS website at law.Harvard.edu/news/spotlight/classroom/problem_solving.html) When I first heard about this “radical innovation,” I thought it was a good joke. But nobody was laughing. This is when the monster first appeared. I heard echoes of western Europeans boasting that they had “discovered” the American continents. And I know from my studies of history that if they claim it, they will try to tame it to their own purposes. That fear is worthy of a monster’s appearance.

Crusaders. No doubt I’m getting too political here, I’m dabbling in hyperbole. But there is a certain kind of enthusiast that scares me. Someone lights upon field placements as a valuable teaching method, which it surely is, but then quickly decides that it is THE valuable teaching method, and oh, by the way, it just happens to be a cheap substitute for in-house clinics. Or a mandatory first-year or third-year course with an experiential component is somebody’s idea of a one-size-fits-all educational unit that will satisfy ABA Standards (assuming the Standards continue to exist), and other initiatives or existing programs are abandoned. Or in a rush to give every student a meaningful experience, community needs and interests are brushed aside with the introduction of a massive service learning requirement that burdens the community and gives back little or nothing. Call me paranoid, but I can see that Crusader monster coming at me.

Regressives. Here’s something else in the talk I hear. I hear the benefits of Carnegie and Best Practices and Clinic in general referred to solely in terms of practical experience and skills. It’s not that I denigrate those things, but several generations of clinical, legal writing, and experiential teachers have advanced pedagogy and theory far beyond skills education and practical experience. The reach of experiential education goes much further. It involves the integration of knowledge with action and responsibility, an integration that comes about as a result of highly sophisticated teaching. (I hope others will offer more articulate explanations of this dynamic.) Practice skills is a beginning, certainly a focus that merits ongoing attention and development, and perhaps even the center of experiential education; but I hope we aren’t entering an era that ignores the many concentric circles of knowledge and experience that surround that center and have been developing for a very long time now. We aren’t really going to start entirely from scratch, are we? That fear is what has me waking from nightmares screaming “It’s not new!” and “It’s not simple!” and “Hey, there are experts in the house!”

In my calmer moments, there is still the dream that the hour of change has come, and that the change will bring something closer to the collective vision of legal education cultivated by these several generations of experiential faculty than the Monsters in the Closet portend. When I am rational enough to listen, my advice to myself is to throw in the DICE. DICE here is an acronym (a pedagogical trick). The initials stand for these buzzwords: Diversity; Intentionality; Competencies; and Engagement.

D.I.C.E.
D: Diversity. We could say that clinic (or, more broadly, experiential education) is a genre, with many subgenres that include: in-house clinic; field placement; policy clinic; hybrid clinic; legal methods, legal writing, simulation. This list is not definitive, and probably can’t be, since, as the genre experts tell us (yes, there are genre experts), genre is a fluid concept, historically and culturally situated. Still, it may be useful to identify elements of these courses and programs in order to organize and classify them into malleable categories with at least temporary boundaries. I offer a few thoughts about how to break down the variables that help define experiences at different schools. This is not meant to be prescriptive, just simple observations about what elements are present and more or less dominant in different programs.

Basically, I believe we are looking to provide a full menu for our students. The exact make-up of the menu is dependent on, among other things, the interests of faculty, faculty and student competencies, and student interests. Among the overall goals of experiential programs are experience-based learning; applied learning or contextualization; use of independent judgment; complex problem solving; and the integration of skills, values, and knowledge domains. With that in mind, some factors in course or program development might include:

Pedagogical Focus:
Doctrine
Skills
Professionalism (Lawyer’s Role and Professional Responsibility)
Policy/ Legal Process/ Systemic Analysis

Methodologies:
Role Play / Simulation
Research and Writing
Vicarious Lawyering
Mentoring Relationships
Small Group Work
Guided Reflection
Guided Discussion
Actual Practice

Complexity Factors:
How much teaching is done “in the moment”
Dealing with real consequences
Dealing with real relationships
Degree of Collaboration
Interdisciplinary coordination
Multiple fields of practice
Multiple problem-solving strategies and fora
Community or public engagement
Number and diversity of clients and issues
Ongoing nature of problems or issues

Additional Factors:
Level of predictability/ control over outcomes & consequences/ risk factors
Extent to which course direction is correctible
Extent to which faculty exercise selectivity in various factors
Contact with and decision-making responsibility with respect to clients
Level of faculty supervision, as well as of supervision in general
Extent to which social justice is a focus

Should faculties pick and choose among these elements, identify and rank the values inherent in them, and determine the likely outcomes or consequences of different configurations, they may begin to hone in on the types of experiential offerings that will work best at their respective institutions.

I: All this leads to the second buzzword: Intentionality. We may aspire to curricular wholeness, but intentionality recognizes the fact that we can’t do it all; we have to make choices. Choices ought to be thoughtful, and not based solely on the economies of the moment. If we want to keep the Crusaders at bay, we have to beware of the risk of presumed interchangeability: these subgenres are not virtually identical, to be reduced to some essentialist idea of practice experience. Four hours of trial advocacy isn’t the equivalent o f four hours of a housing clinic; externing in a prosecutor’s office doesn’t expose students to the same learning that preparing testimony for a legislative hearing on a criminal justice initiative does. ne isn’t necessarily better than another, but choosing one model over the other entails loss. In clinical methodological terms, we have to articulate goals, think consequences, clarify values, then make hard choices. Wholeness, moreover, isn’t necessarily linear. A lot of planning has to go into sequencing and coordination.

C: When making choices, one of the factors has to be Competencies. I am not speaking of the competencies we want our students to leave with; I am speaking of the competencies that faculty bring to teaching in the experiential forum. I’d venture to guess that in most schools, there are a lot of people who know a little about experiential pedagogy, but that few schools have large numbers of expert, experienced experiential teachers. This presents a good many challenges. There are those who know something, but don’t know they know it; those who think they know a lot but are mistaken; those who have no interest in knowing; those who would be interested if only they had the time or a safe way to learn; those who know a lot but whose knowledge isn’t noticed because of status hierarchies or time or geography; those who know everything about law teaching and can say without a doubt that experiential competency is not in the mix of “everything” there is to know. How to approach this? The evaluation experts have given us some tools. For example, we can chart rubrics for our own competencies the way we are being taught to chart students’ progress.

I can offer a sample of competency rubrics in Experiential Pedogogy (EP) (it’s based on an instrument developed for a Community-Engaged Scholars Project at the University of Minnesota; most of the credit goes to my colleagues in this project, Bill Doherty, Gail Dubrow, Cathy Jordan, and Tai Mendenhall ).

 Competency Level in Experiential Pedagogy (EP)   Knowledge/Theory      Practice/Skills     Integration of Theory            and Practice
               
             0                        		 Has minimal knowledge in experiential pedagogy Has no ability in essential practice skills Has no understanding of relationship between theory and practice.
1
Basic
Familiarity		 Has some familiarity with experiential pedagogy Has had exposure to and has observed skill sets or competencies successfully used in practice; has had some opportunity to practice skills; has interest in or exposure to skills utilized in context. Can recognize conceptually applications of integrated knowledge and theory in context; can identify basic principles of EP in their application.
2
Working
Application		 Is able to integrate and articulate diverse elements of EP knowledge/theory Effectively utilizes skill sets; consciously employs theoretical frameworks, models and methods of EP in practice or teaching. Can effectively apply theory to factual or practice context; is able to work with others in developing methodologies for teaching.
3  
Critical Analysis		 Has done critical analysis of and reflection on work of others using EP principles in the analysis. Has done critical analysis of processes, methods, or systems, including  proposals for change, through grant writing, political action, community education or similar initiatives.      Has done critical analysis of systems, policies, or institutions crossing academic and practice lines.
               4    Communication Has demonstrated ability to synthesize and engage in creative analysis by putting EP work into communicable form; has record of scholarly production in appropriate media or publications; has knowledge of and has successfully applied EP benchmarks, outcomes, and assessments. Has a record of successful experimentation in methodologies; is recognized for leadership in some circles of practice or teaching; is able to share and transfer skills and enhance capacity, through, e.g., teaching, faculty/ professional development, community building. Has engaged in successful collaborations across disciplines or fields of practice; works effectively to translate EP theory and methods into actions that have significant policy implications; is able to effectively describe the scholarly components of   the work.
             5

Demonstrated
Influence

 Can show demonstrable influence in professional spheres; is able to help those engaged in EP to thrive in an academic environment.              Can demonstrate impact on processes, methods or systems; successfully uses understanding of methods processes, and systems through service in spheres of influence such as RPT committees, board memberships, standards development groups.   Has been instrumental in effectuating systemic change or transforming practice paradigms; provides beneficial support to students, junior faculty and/or others engaged in establishing and developing EP courses or projects.

I’m not sure it can be reproduced here in a readable form, but I can say that it places experiential pedagogy (EP) competencies in three categories: Knowledge/Theory; Practice/Skills; and Integration of Theory and Practice. Each category is then broken down into competencies at five different levels: 1, Basic Familiarity; 2, Working Application; 3, Critical Analysis; 4, Communication; and 5 Demonstrated Influence. I am happy to share the chart with anyone who is interested. Development of and discussion around a competency chart like this could yield significant results. Ok, good luck with that.

E: Finally, we might be able to control the monsters in the closet by acts of Engagement. We need to talk, openly, honestly, often. The most successful innovations follow patterns of communication, leadership, conflict resolution. To give credit where credit is due, the Harvard 1L workshops do engage tenured, non-clinical faculty; if they have been having conversations across the teaching hierarchy, hats off to them. There are many schools taking those first steps, many of which involve boundary crossings. We all benefit if these beginnings lead to bigger structural shifts. It’s never easy and it takes time, but that’s what it will certainly take to keep the monsters away. Best Practices and the Carnegie report were great leaps forward. But it’s worth remembering that winning a battle isn’t winning a war. And winning a war is just the beginning of many battles to come.

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Challenges in the New Law School Year

Posted on August 20, 2010 by Mary A. Lynch

            Suddenly, the semester is upon us! Where did the summer go? Why didn’t I complete all my “projects” – why am I not fully prepared for the new semester?  As I work hard to prepare for a new semester of teaching and learning and experimenting, I realize that I need to turn the focus from “me, me, me” to “them, them, them”.

            And in doing so, I cannot help but worry about the challenges in store for the new crop of law students walking through our front doors. How will the legal profession have changed by the time they graduate?  What impact will technology and globalization have on their lives – negative or positive? How will employers evaluate young attorneys? What financial burdens will these students bear and how can they create sound personal lives built on large debt?  Will law schools truly be able to prepare them for what lies ahead and assist them in achieving a rewarding professional life?

            I find it daunting to think about these challenges.  As this generation enters a difficult job market for legal services, legal educators have more responsibility than ever to provide students with a foundation for success, formative assessment of where they stand on the continuum of professional development, and pragmatic understanding of the new legal employment world.  How can we possibly educate our students so that they graduate with the amount of core knowledge, proficiency of skill and understanding of professional identity which the current legal employer is seeking?  

            After many years of teaching, I have learned that I can’t solve every problem and can’t achieve every goal in one class, one course, or one semester.  However, each time I revisit my course goals, improve my syllabus, inform myself about what today’s students need, and work towards curriculum revision, I better the learning outcome – even if it’s only incrementally. And even when the experiment fails, the “hoped- for- learning-epiphany” evaporates, I have learned that students appreciate faculty members who care enough to revisit what they have taught before and who worry about students’ futures.  Law students usually demonstrate that appreciation by working harder and engaging with the material more deeply, thus, improving their own knowledge, skills and understanding.

            Good Luck to all you law teachers and law students as the academic year begins.  Tell us here at the BP Blog, what you are hoping for or concerned about at this pivotal juncture in legal education?

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Study Suggests that Success in Skills Means Success in Law School

Posted on June 10, 2010 by Kevin Ramakrishna

By: Professors Jenean Taranto and Rosemary Queenan

Among different academic variables, a student’s “Lawyering Skills Grade” is “the strongest predictor of law school success.”  That is the conclusion Leah M. Christensen, Associate Professor of Law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, reached in her article “The Power of Skills Training: A Study of Lawyering Skills Grades as the Strongest Predictor of Law School Success (Or in Other Words, It’s Time For Legal Education to Get Serious About Skills Training if We Care About How Our Students Learn.” Christensen reached this conclusion based on her study, which sought “to explore the relationship between law students’ achievement goals and their success in law school,” by asking “157 law students to respond to a survey about their learning goals in law school.”  Responses by the students “were correlated to different academic variables, including class rank, LSAT score, Undergraduate GPA (UPGA) and Lawyering Skills Grade.”  Christensen’s results found that the “Lawyering Skills Grade was the strongest predictor of law student success . . .” and “the LSAT was the weakest predictor of law school success.”  Christensen’s study also concluded that “law students who did well in their Lawyering Skills classes tended to be mastery-oriented learners, and that law students who were mastery-oriented learners were more successful in law school overall.”  Christensen notes that the correlation between success in the Lawyering Skills course and mastery-oriented learners exists because “Lawyering Skills classes appear to emphasize mastery-goals.”  Skills classes tend to encourage mastery-oriented goals by teaching students “reasoning skills ‘such as issue spotting, fact identification, fact analysis, rule identification and application of rules to facts . . . .’”  Additionally, the “concepts of advocacy, negotiation and client counseling” help to promote mastery-goal orientation.

Her study articulates a premise that has been recognized by the Albany Law School Lawyering program for approximately twenty years.  Albany’s Introduction to Lawyering program integrates theory with practice by engaging first-year students in problem solving and client-centered practice along with research, reasoning, and extensive legal analysis, and writing.  Students are assigned to “firms” representing parties in a year-long simulated legal dispute and are introduced to the legal system, ethics, and the skills and values of the profession in a practice-based context. 

In the course of representing a client throughout two semesters, students begin fact development by interviewing clients, learn to research by finding the statutes and cases relevant to the client’s situation, and learn analytical and writing skills by producing legal documents needed to represent the client.  The skills introduced through highly structured research and writing assignments in the first semester are honed in the second semester as students engage in fact development through a discovery-like process that emphasizes the relationship between law and fact.  Students further conduct independent legal research, and write and re-write the relevant legal analysis first in a trial court memo and then in an appellate brief.  Through this process, students receive a thorough grounding in statutory analysis, rule synthesis, and analytical legal writing.   By participating in settlement negotiations and appellate arguments, students also develop their analytical skills through oral communication exercises that reinforce the written assignments. The program exemplifies that teaching Lawyering in context results in greater understanding of the relationship between legal research, writing, theory, and practice. 

Christensen correctly points out that teaching skills in this way fosters greater mastery-goal orientated learning and less performance-goal learning. By introducing skills and theory from an integrated learning perspective, students have no choice but to become mastery-oriented learners because, in the context of a “real life” legal problem, students seek to achieve the best outcome for their client, working with a purpose that teaches them to ask questions, read authority critically, and focus on fact development with greater depth.  Critical thinking is further encouraged in Lawyering skills classes by support and guidance from professors who assess student performance based on multiple assignments throughout the course of the semester and year, meeting individually with students in conferences, providing productive feedback throughout the course of the year, and allowing for collaborative learning exercises.  Christensen notes that the Carnegie Commission agrees by suggesting that “‘[t]he dramatic results of the first year of law school’s emphasis on well-honed skills of legal analysis should be matched by similar skill in serving clients and a solid ethical grounding.’”  The commission findings further note that “‘[i]f legal education were serious about such a goal, it would require a bolder, more integrated approach.’”

Once students learn to approach problems as mastery-goal learners, they inevitably become stronger students overall and, ultimately, better lawyers.

To read Professor Christensen’s article, click here.

Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Best Practices & Setting Goals | 2 Comments »

ABA Curriculum Survey Coming!

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Antoinette Sedillo Lopez

Catherine Carpenter is chairing the ABA Curriculum Committee, which is gearing up for an update of its 5 year old curriculum survey. Last time the major curricular change was the increase in the number of clinical programs. It will be interesting to see how law school offerings have changed in the last five years and whether these changes are in the direction of best practices. Catherine has led the committee through the updating of the last survey instrument and we have added some questions that seem of interest.

Here is the timeline for the Committee:

June 15 – August 1 Test the Survey instrument with a group of 15 diverse law schools

August 1 – Sept 15 Revise the Survey instrument based on the feedback received from the testing group

Sept 15 – Dec 2010 Launch Survey to all law schools with a three month window to return the Questionnaires

Jan-July 2011 Analyze the data results and draft the narratives that accompany each section

Fall 2011 Prepare the Report for Publication

Be on the look out for it! The last report was very interesting and I think this one will even be more interesting for those who care about legal education.

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Imagine…Learning from Real Life

Posted on March 12, 2010 by Justin Myers

Students choose to enroll in law school. They arrive on the first day excited to begin learning the law.  Unfortunately, most students lose this excitement for learning somewhere on the road to graduation, and instead, turn their interest to actually practicing.  In a recent article, Critical Enculturation: Using Problems to Teach Law, Professor Keith Hirokawa of Albany Law School demonstrates how Problem-Based Learning (PBL) can push students to once again engage their education in law with passion — passion for their chosen profession and the subject matter at hand. 

Professor Hirokawa uses his land use planning course to illustrate the PBL approach, and provides several examples of activities that force students to tackle issues that the students could conceivably face as clients. The activities include: requiring students to determine whether she would be able to hang a shingle and open a solo law practice at her residence; turning the classroom into multiple zoning districts; and assigning students to advocacy groups to represent the interests of identified clients in case simulations.

Professor Hirokawa is not the only professor at Albany Law School who is writing about engaged teaching and innovative activities in scholarly papers.  Associate Dean Patricia Salkin (a frequent contributor to this blog) believes that courses in Land Use Planning can be the perfect ground for implementing the strategies of Best Practices. Dean Salkin states that “unique opportunit[ies] exist through the application of many “best practices” concepts for land use law faculty to lead the academy in reinventing curriculum and teaching strategies to better prepare students for the practice of law” in her new paper,  Practically Grounded: Convergence of Land Use Law Pedagogy and Best Practices, which is co-authored by John R. Nolon.

Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Best Practices, Outcomes & Assessment Techniques, Catalysts For Change | 1 Comment »

Of Business Models and Best Practices

Posted on March 9, 2010 by dmaranville

My dean just forwarded the announcement below about a contest/series of conferences & working sessions hosted by NY and Harvard Law Schools over the next year to generate ideas about new business models for law schools and concrete steps to implement them.  Though the announcement focuses on “business models,”  the first sentence on the webpage link is “Got an idea about the future of U.S. legal education? Think it’s time to go clinical? Or global? Or virtual?”

What’s the relationship between our law school business models and best educational practices?  Unfortunately, the first session conflicts with the Minnesota Experiential Renaissance Roundtable on April 9 and 10, so I won’t be able to find out by attending the conference.  Look forward to getting the skinny from the rest of you!

“New York Law School – April 9-10

Harvard Law School – October 15-16

New York Law School and Harvard Law School are hosting a year-long contest of ideas about legal education. The goal is to come up with operational alternatives to the traditional law school business model and to identify concrete steps for the implementation of new designs. The kickoff event is a two-day conference for educators, employers, and regulators at New York Law School on April 9-10, 2010, to identify problems, innovations and constraints, and to organize working groups to develop designs and strategies for implementation. Working groups will refine their ideas and reconvene for a second meeting at Harvard Law School on October 15-16, 2010. Final designs will be presented, with commentary, at New York Law School in April, 2011.

Interested? Questions? Please visit http://www.nyls.edu/futureed”



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Journal of Legal Education Calls for Third Year Curricular Reform Efforts

Posted on March 2, 2010 by Justin Myers

Our friends over at the  Journal of Legal Education are soliciting examples and articles that relate to Third-year curricular reform efforts.  The publishers are looking for information as simple as referrals to websites describing your innovations, or as polished as full journal articles.  Responses should be sent to jle@swlaw.edu.

Hey, and while your at it, why not post your Third-year curricular innovations to the Blog as well?  …Please.

Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum | 2 Comments »

My Experiment with teaching Trusts and Estates, Outcomes-Style

Posted on March 1, 2010 by Carolyn Grose

For the past two years, I have served on two distinct but related committees having to do with “the future of legal education.”  Here at William Mitchell, I am on the “Future of Legal Education Task Force,” in which capacity I contributed to writing a lengthy report on “Outcomes-based education,” portions of which have appeared on this blog in the past.  In addition, I am a member of the Best Practices Implementation committee, which is charged with figuring out ways to both implement the suggestions made in Best Practices for Legal Education, and to gather information about who is doing what innovations related to the book.  In other words, ideas about the design and delivery of legal instruction in new and more effective ways have been much on my mind over the past 24 months.

 I learned in the spring of 2009 that I would be teaching Trusts and Estates for the first time the following spring (ie right now!).  At that time, the Mitchell Task Force was finalizing its report, and the BPI Committee was finalizing its survey, and it occurred to me that I had a great opportunity here to put these ideas to the test. 

Instead of doing what I have always done when teaching a course for the first time – talk to a bunch of people about what books they use and what they do in their courses, get a bunch of syllabi, maybe some class notes, put together my own syllabus and then start planning my classes – I would start from the end point, ie I would ask myself:  what are my goals for this course? Or, put another way, what do I want my students to be able to do when they’re done with the course?  From there, I would work backwards, through assessment methods (what evidence will I need to know whether they have achieved these particular goals or outcomes?), to delivery of instruction (how do I put together a syllabus and class activities that will facilitate the students’ meeting of these goals?), and finally to evaluation.  That, simply put, is outcomes-based education.

I have been amazed at how satisfying this process has been.  From learning the material myself to designing assessment tools to deciding what to cover in each class, having the touchstone question of “what are my goals for this particular piece” has made each task manageable and a coherent part of the bigger puzzle.  I believe the course I ended up with, and am now half-way through teaching, is more thoughtful and interesting than it would have been if I had gone about planning and delivering it without thinking about goals and outcomes.  I certainly am having more fun teaching it; we’ll have to wait and see the student evaluations to see if the feeling is shared by the consumers!

Stay tuned . . . .

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Integrating Internet-Based and Teleconferencing Resources into On-Line Teaching

Posted on February 8, 2010 by Patricia Salkin

Note: This is a continuing weblog describing my experiences teaching an on-line course in government ethics.

The on-line government ethics course this semester has already benefitted from a number of internet-based resources as well as teleconferencing.  With one of my early organizing goals to keep the “virtual class” as interactive as possible through the use of discussion boards and wikis available on TWEN, I also looked to see what other resources might be available on the Internet. To my surprise, there were a number of opportunities to integrate interactive ethics training into the course. 

For example, most state ethics agencies now offer on-line training for covered employees.  I contacted the NYS Commission on Public Integrity and they were agreeable to providing each of the students in the course with a user ID and password to enable students to take the Commission’s on-line training based on the ethics laws in New York.  This training was a wonderful introduction for the students to the types of issues typically covered in an ethics regulatory regime.  Another aspect of this on-line training was that at the end of each topical interval there was a quiz for participants to complete.  The entire training could take anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours to complete, depending upon whether users go straight through the course, or take the opportunity to click on links to actual statutes, regulations and opinions that go into further detail on the particular subject matter being discussed.  I asked the students to evaluate this training experience when they concluded the program. Their reactions were interesting.  Almost everyone commented that the training was beneficial and a good introduction for government employees about the law.  Many students commented that they thought this on-line training was too basic, yet, a number of these students also admitted that they were surprised to have gotten a lot of the quiz questions wrong.  From this, several students observed how nuanced government ethics laws really are, and that the appropriate course of action when it comes to ethics is not always so obvious. This was an excellent teaching opportunity to point out how even people who are “trained” in the law can make mistakes, how individuals may not fully understand the application of the law to their actions, and why it is important to carefully read the statutes and regulations and to critically analyze the facts and the law. 

Early in the semester we studied the difficulties surrounding the question of attorney-client privilege in the government context.  As luck would have it, ALI-ABA was promoting a one-hour practitioner-oriented teleconference on the attorney-client privilege.  Although this was not focused exclusively on government law practice, I thought it would be a good opportunity for the students to get a fuller understanding of the practical issues involved in application of the privilege.  Perhaps because I frequently volunteer to teach ALI-ABA courses, I asked and was given permission for my students to participate in the course at no charge.  ALI-ABA sent each student a password to access the lunch-time program.  While many students commented that they wished the program had focused on the privilege in the government context, a lot of students wrote in their program evaluation to me that the course was interesting and they reflected on how it related to both what we studied in government ethics and what they discussed in their professional responsibility and evidence classes.  This proved to be another good experience and opportunity to weave together ethics and professionalism and evidence along the continuum of the overall law school educational experience. It was practice oriented and it also covered doctrinal subject matter tested on the bar exam.

Lastly, for fun, the federal Office of Government Ethics (OGE) offers interactive games to reinforce serious ethics subject matter.  I provided students a link in the weekly course materials folders to two of OGE’s interactive crossword puzzles where users can test their knowledge of federal ethics laws. While I didn’t specifically require the students to complete the crossword puzzles, I used it as an optional and alternative on-line teaching tool.

The above are just some of the examples of the various tools available to supplement a virtual classroom learning experience.  Although I have not used them yet, there are government ethics training videos available on You-Tube and other web-based sources, and a number of states post on-line the oral arguments before their high court, providing yet another great resource for many different subject areas.

Patty Salkin, Albany Law School

Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Best Practices for Institutional Effectiveness, Technology | Tagged: , | 3 Comments »

Updating Institutional Responses to Best Practices

Posted on February 2, 2010 by Mary A. Lynch

St. John’s U Law School Professor Gina Calabrese posted this query to the clinic listserv:  

“I’d like to hear from other clinicians whose schools are taking
steps to study and implement the Best Practices report.  What
is being done, what issues are being raised?” 

I think this would make a good public discussion.  We know that U of Dayton has created the “Lawyer as Problem Solver” Program (http://law.udayton.edu/prospectivestudents).  And,everyone has heard about Washington & Lee’s 3rd year reform. (http://law.wlu.edu/thirdyear).  

However, these schools are not the only ones engaged in change. Much energy and work and thinking and reform is occurring without fanfare or media attention – so here is your chance to share news about your school!

Let’s see if we can get at least 50 schools to report! I’ll start with ALBANY LAW: 

ALBANY – the Dean has established a Center for Excellence in Law Teaching to document ongoing reform and to support teaching and curriculum enhancement.  ( see www.teachinglawstudents.com and click on Albany Law Initiatives or go straight to http://www.albanylaw.edu/sub.php?navigation_id=1717 ).

Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Catalysts For Change | 4 Comments »

On-Line Discussion Boards Create a New Arena for Engaged Learning Environments

Posted on January 27, 2010 by Patricia Salkin

What’s better than the Socratic Method to engage all students in a course?  On-line discussion boards.

One of the challenges in creating the virtual classroom is to strive for students to substitute time that would have been spent sitting in a seat in an actual classroom for time spent engaged in the discussion on-line.  In addition to viewing short slide presentations with audio, and participating in occasional other on-line instruction (for example, this week the students were registered for and participated in a 45 minute on-line ethics training program developed by the NYS Commission on Public Integrity; and they were registered for a one hour ALI-ABA teleconference on the attorney-client privilege), the remainder of our instruction hours for the week are spent on the discussion boards.

So far I have opted to post three questions per week, and I have required the students to respond to at least two of the three questions, and then post replies to at two postings made by their colleagues (requiring 4 postings in total).  With 22 students enrolled in the course, it would be near impossible in a seminar of this size to actively engage every student in every class hour.  With the on-line discussion board, however, each and every student is an engaged learner who must participate in the class discussion.  In other words, no one gets a “bye” for the weekly class reading, and everyone must learn to be reflective, analytical and articulate in the written postings they make to the discussion boards.  Not only do I read the postings, but every class member reads the postings as well.  By week two, I realized the power of the discussion boards.

The two discussions I opened were:

1)    Based on Chapter 2, it is fair to conclude that defining exactly “who” is the client of the government lawyer is a difficult and challenging task, yet one that it is extremely important (at least in terms of confidentiality of communications which we will discuss in another posting).  Please respond for making a case that one of the following should be appropriately viewed as the client of the General Counsel to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) and explain why: 1) The Governor; 2) The Commissioner of DEC; 3) The Counsel to the Governor; 4) A high ranking official within the agency other than the Commissioner; 5) Anyone in the Agency who sits down for a conversation with the Agency Counsel; 6) The public; or 7) Other (be specific). Is your answer the same if the attorney is not the DEC General Counsel, but rather an Assistant Counsel who reports to a deputy counsel who reports to the general counsel?  What if you work in the attorney general’s office and your job, according to the New York Executive Law, is to represent the State?

2)    From reading both Chapter 12 and the article in the folder for week 2, it is apparent that the federal courts are in conflict as to whether a government attorney-client privilege exists. This is an issue that will likely get before the U.S. Supreme Court some day. Please explain why you believe there should or should not be an attorney-client privilege. Your answer may consider the following: Does it matter whether the underlying conversations and litigation involve civil or criminal matters? If a privilege exists, does it belong to the government official or some other office/agency in government? What type of legal and regulatory arguments can you make to support your policy position?

These questions were directed, yet open ended enough to allow students to craft carefully thought-out responses and to challenge and engage students with differing perspectives and interpretations.  In the classroom, students may have responded with short answers in a sentence or two and full explanations may have had to be painstakingly extracted. Using the on-line forum, however, I received outstanding responses that demonstrated students did the reading, applied the applicable laws and policies, and considered the legal and policy challenges in reaching conclusions.  Their responses ranged from one full paragraph to four or five paragraphs.

In short, the discussion boards are proving to be an excellent teaching tool.  

Patty Salkin, Albany Law School

Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Teaching Methodology | Tagged: , | 7 Comments »

Course Design – Technology Meets Substance in On-Line Curriculum Development

Posted on January 20, 2010 by Patricia Salkin

After setting course learning outcomes for the on-line government ethics course, I had to revise my syllabus to better match my goals and desired outcomes mindful of the on-line format, and I had to develop creative strategies for creating a vibrant virtual discussion that would satisfactorily create a functional equivalent of an in-person classroom discussion.

To be honest, this was easier than I thought it would be using the functionality of TWEN.  I selected one soft cover book as the course text, and have supplemented that with readings mostly available on-line or in the public domain that are posted to the course site in weekly course resource folders.

I typically require students to complete assignments in my courses, and I wanted to find a way that these tasks could add to the vibrancy of the course by being shared with all  participants rather than being e-mailed only to me using the TWEN assignment drop-box. At the end of December, TWEN added a Wiki function to the site, and this was the perfect opportunity.  Each student was asked to sign-up for one state that they will follow through the semester.  I set up a series of Wikis where students will be posting short narratives and links to statutes, regulations and opinions from their state about subject matters we will be studying that particular week.  All of the states the students selected appear on the Wiki page for a given week, and each student accesses the Wiki and inputs the information for their state. So, for example, in week two, students have to merely find and post the on-line links to their state ethics commission, ethics laws and lobbying laws.  In week three, students will have to actually critically read and start to parse aspects of the state statutes in order to answer a series of questions about their state ethics commission.  The assignment reads as follows:

Using the state laws from the state you have selected for the semester (note: the following 10 states do NOT have ethics commissions – Arizona, Idaho, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Virginia and Wyoming), please find the applicable provisions dealing with the composition of the state ethics commission. Under your state listing in this wiki, please answer the questions below:

1. How many people are on the commission (board)?
2. Who appoints the members of the commission (board)?
3. What is the term of office for members?
4. Are there criteria/qualifications/disqualifications for members?
5. Are there provisions for removal of members? How is the chair of the commission (board) selected?
7. Who appoints the executive director of the commission (board)?
8. Is the executive director appointed for a term?
9. Does the law provide for removal of the executive director?
10. Does the commission (board) have subpoena power?
11. Does the commission have jurisdiction over both executive and legislative branch officers and employees; municipal employees; lobbyists?

Provide the on-line link to the applicable provisions of state law that support your summary.

When completed, the class will have a 23-state comparative overview of the differences and similarities of state statutes on this topic which will be the basis of a question on our Discussion Board (I’ll write more about the Discussion Boards in a future posting).

For those interested, my colleague Darlene Cardillo, our Instructional Technologist at Albany Law School has posted a summary of week one of the course from a technology perspective on her blog here. The results of our pre-course student survey about their familiarity with on-line learning and with TWEN can be viewed here, you can read about the only in-person class, a one hour orientation here,.

Patty Salkin, Albany Law School

Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Best Practices, Outcomes & Assessment Techniques, Teaching Methodology, Technology, Uncategorized | Tagged: , | 7 Comments »

Wegner’s Thoughts on Legal Education Reform: Legal Education’s Wicked Problems

Posted on January 9, 2010 by jwegner

At long last, I’ve completed (and Rutgers Law Review as published) an expanded essay on my own thoughts regarding the Carnegie Foundation’s study of legal education.  The essay is entitled “Reframing Legal Education’s Wicked Problems” and is available at SSRN (http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1533778) and on the Rutgers Law Review website (http://pegasus.rutgers.edu/~review/vol61n4.php).  I’ve tried to facilitate further discussion of several facets of the Carnegie study work (particularly by incorporating more excerpts of interviews with faculty and students about what is meant by “thinking like a lawyer” and how the related skills are taught).  I’m also happy to be able to contribute at some length to thinking about why upper division curriculum reform is so difficult, why it is so needed, and how it might be approached, particularly by taking into account issues relating to personal and professional identity that face students of this generation.   An abstract follows. –Judith Wegner (judith_wegner@unc.edu)

Abstract:

The essay, by one of the authors of Educating Lawyers (the “Carnegie Report”) offers fresh insights as to why legal education reform is so difficult, drawing upon the theory of “wicked problems” increasingly used in public policy, engineering and a variety of other fields. It demonstrates the application of that theory with reference to the oft-told tale of Rumpelstiltskin, and draws from that tale key lessons that can be used by those seeking to create a new prospectus for legal education in coming years. It then illuminates four “wicked problems: that have plagued legal education for years: how responsibility should be allocated for lawyer preparation; why change in content alone does not result in enduring improvements in legal education; whether “thinking like a lawyer” has a continuing place in legal education; and how the upper division can be fruitfully improved. In illuminating these problems, it also offers suggestions for how they might be approached and resolved.

After providing background on the characteristics of “wicked problems” and how they can best be approached, the essay focuses on “commonplaces” that underlie professional work and accordingly should drive professional education (including legal education), thereby providing a fresh framework for actionable steps to improve legal education and the practice of law.It next S discusses the need to attend both to visible and invisible dimensions of problems in order to shape meaningful solutions and explains the importance of often unrecognized dynamics of learning and teaching as major forces that play crucial roles in legal education and curriculum reform.

The essay then discusses the power of naming, offering an in-depth look at the nuances of “thinking like a lawyer” as understood by students and faculty members interviewed at sixteen diverse law schools in connection with the site visits that informed the Carnegie Report. It stresses the specific ways that first year case-dialogue instruction forces students to deal with uncertainty, one of the critical dimensions of professional practice, and unpacks the notion of “thinking like a lawyer” in ways that should prove illuminating for students and helpful for faculty members who seek to help students understand the resulting changes in epistemology that are so central to the first year of law school. It also considers the nature of the “case-dialogue method” and explains the ways in which that classic teaching technique plays a critical role in building students‘ abilities to think analytically.

Finally, the essay considers one of legal education‘s most intransigent “wicked problems”: the upper division curriculum. Using insights from the theory of “wicked problems,”The essay endeavors to explain why upper division curriculum reform is so difficult. It then offers four strategies for “renegotiating” existing assumptions and practices in order to improve the upper division curriculum. These strategies (including purposeful redesign on the large scale, rethinking content, rethinking pedagogy, and re-balancing teaching and learning responsibilities) each of which are very likely need to be used in concert in order for meaningful improvements to occur. In particular, this portion of the essay incorporates insights from educational psychology and work on professional identity development in graduate students to stress the ways in which effective advanced curricular innovations should attend to the challenges faced by the current generation of students who, much more than those in past decades, face challenges in navigating changes in personal identity at the same time they confront the need to develop a sense of professional identity before leaving law school.

Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, First Year Law School Innovations, Teaching Methodology | 1 Comment »

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