Queries from the Best Practices Implementation Committee

Posted on September 29, 2008 by Carolyn Grose

We had a fantastic time in Seattle a few weeks ago, and I for one felt reinvigorated and excited about this great project we’re all involved in — you know, the one about totally reforming legal education? What we didn’t get either from the Best Practices Meets Reality workshop (see my earlier post on September 9th) was much discussion about the following questions.  So I’d be very interested in seeing if we can generate some dialogue here, and then maybe take it on the road at the next round of conferences. 

Let’s brainstorm and generate concrete ideas about the following:

  • A Best Practices checklist or other instrument for implementing curricular and other law school reform;
  • A Best Practices checklist or other instrument for self- and external assessment of individual courses, teaching methods and law school curricula;
  • Potential obstacles to using Best Practices for change or assessment;
  • How to actively engage law students (and perhaps, where feasible, graduate students in education) in selection of educational objectives, development of creative and sophisticated teaching techniques, and assessment of teaching choices and curricular reforms;
  • The feasibility and desirability of a “Commitment to Best Practices for Legal Education” policy statement for potential adoption by law schools;
  • The feasibility and desirability of developing “Best Practices implementation consultants” to engage with law school faculty and administrators;
  • The feasibility and desirability of developing honors, recognition, and/or awards for legal educators and law schools committed to and actively engaged in implementation of Best Practices strategies and techniques (e.g. a Best Practices Certification Program);
  • How to use – and teach others not at the workshop to use — the Best Practices Blog to learn about innovative legal education, including the experiences of law schools that are using elements of Best Practices;
  • Other vehicles to publicize examples of successful implementation of Best Practices concepts and make available detailed information about outcomes.

What do you all think?

 

Carolyn Grose

Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Best Practices for Institutional Effectiveness, Best Practices, Outcomes & Assessment Techniques, Catalysts For Change, Teaching Methodology | Comments Off on Queries from the Best Practices Implementation Committee

Passion, Context, Redux (Part 1)

Posted on September 26, 2008 by dmaranville

A fun aspect of getting a few gray hairs: we’re around long enough to see our ideas come to fruition.   Some years ago I wrote about the important role of experiential learning in providing context for law students.  Continue reading →

Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Catalysts For Change, First Year Law School Innovations, Teaching Methodology | Comments Off on Passion, Context, Redux (Part 1)

Counting Clinical Opportunities

Posted on September 16, 2008 by Antoinette Sedillo Lopez

I just finished writing a letter to the editor of National Jurist about the magazine’s ranking of the “Best Law Schools for Practical Training” in the September issue.  They don’t have a letter to the editor section, so I don’t expect it to get it published, but I did want to educate the magazine about Best Practices and Carnegie.  The methodology of the ranking was apparently to count the total number of students enrolled in the school and divide that by the number of clinical spots available and then rank the law schools based on that quotient. 

 

At a law school like New Mexico which has a mandatory clinic, they apparently only counted the mandatory clinic slots (about a third of the student body since clinic is normally taken in the third year of law school).  We ended up ranking 14th.  I realize that is pretty good, but then the article states that the top school, Yale, offers clinical opportunities to 90% of its student body.   Of course, schools such as UNM, CUNY, UDC and others that require clinic for graduation offer clinical opportunities to 100% of the student body.  So, I am unsure how a school that offers clinic to 90% of its students is ranked higher than those schools that offer it to 100% of its students.  In addition, the raw numbers fail to take into account the rest of the law school curriculum and its commitment to training that is consistent with Best Practices and Carnegie. Of course, the schools that were ranked at the top of the survey are excellent schools and likely to do well, in large part, because of their commitment to clinical legal education

 

Roy Stuckey has asked whether someone should evaluate law schools based on the ideas in Best Practices.  While it is great that magazines such as National Jurist are interested in writing pieces about practical education, given these quantitative types of rankings, the idea of some qualitative evaluation would be a service to future law students. 

Filed under: Best Practices & Setting Goals, Catalysts For Change, Uncategorized | Tagged: , | 2 Comments »

Thinking About Learning Goals

Posted on September 16, 2008 by Margaret Moore Jackson

One of the more surprising aspects of law teaching is how hard it is to articulate with specificity the outcomes we are trying to achieve. Our goals seem too obvious to even discuss – until we try to pin them down. The challenge of identifying learning goals is present at all levels of academic decision-making, from planning individual courses to revisiting a law school’s stated institutional mission. For those of us who are relatively new to thinking about assessment, it can be difficult to get started.

At the Crossroads conference in Seattle earlier this month (Legal Education at the Crossroads:  Ideas to Implementation), Barbara Glesner-Fines presented, among other things, a series of questions that can be used to generate productive thinking about learning goals. During her talk, she asked members of the audience to respond to question 16, “What major misunderstanding, mistaken assumption, prejudice, or bad habit (of thought or practice) do students bring to your course that you would like them to “unlearn”? The responses contributed by conference attendees were vivid and specific – nothing like the broadly meaningless attempts at defining learning goals one sometimes sees/hears/engages in. Attacking the weighty issue of learning goals with smaller, more manageable questions, from different angles, initiates a good dialogue (whether with colleagues or with oneself). Which can lead to actual results.

While Glesner-Fines and her colleagues developed these questions during collaborative discussions about assessment among UM-KC family law faculty, I could also see using variations of these questions to spark a larger discussion about the programmatic goals of an institution. Thanks to Barbara for providing the link. Enjoy.

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

Dispatch from the Crossroads (of innovation and reform)

Posted on September 9, 2008 by Carolyn Grose

Setting:   Seattle.  It’s sunny and warm.  Mt. Rainier beams down on us like a wise and indulgent grandfather.   We’re all set for 42 hours of thought, discussion and plotting revolution in and of the legal academy.  And that’s what we do.  Continue reading →

Filed under: Catalysts For Change | 2 Comments »

ABA Council on Legal Education, Outcome Measures Committee Report

Posted on September 6, 2008 by Antoinette Sedillo Lopez

I just saw that  the Outcome Measures Report is posted on the ABA web site.  The Outcome Measure Committee was chaired by Randy Hertz and is a tour de force.  The Report cites Best Practices and the Carnegie Report extensively, it then goes on to look at legal education in other countries, accreditation in other disciplines and regional accreditation standards for universities and colleges.  The Report concludes that the ABA accreditation standards should be less “input driven” and more “outcome  driven”.   It even begins to consider the costs of this shift in accreditation standards. Check out the report!

http://www.abanet.org/legaled/

Filed under: Best Practices, Outcomes & Assessment Techniques, Catalysts For Change, Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | 3 Comments »

Law 2.0 to be published January 2009

Posted on August 12, 2008 by Darlene

Here’s the abstract from David Thomson University of Denver Sturm College of Law:

Legal education is at a crossroads. As a media saturated generation of students enters law school, they find themselves thrust into a fairly backward mode of instruction, much of which is over 100 years old. Over those years, legal education has resisted many creditable reports recommending change, most recently those from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and the Clinical Legal Education Association. Meanwhile, the cost of legal education continues to skyrocket, with many law students graduating with crushing debt they have difficulty paying back. All of these factors are likely to reach a crescendo in the next few years, setting the stage for a perfect storm out of which can come significant change.

But legal education has successfully resisted systemic change for many years. Given that dubious track record, the only way significant change can reasonably be predicted is if something is different this time. Fortunately, there is something different this time: the ubiquity of technology. Since the MacCrate report in 1992, the internet has achieved massive growth, and a generation of students have grown up with sophisticated and pervasive use of technology in nearly every facet of their lives.

This book describes how the perfect storm of generational change and the rising cost and criticisms of legal education, combined with extraordinary technological developments, will change the face of legal education as we know it today. Its scope extends from generational changes in our students, to pedagogical shifts inside and outside of the classroom, to hybrid textbooks, all the way to methods of active, interactive, and hypertextual learning. And it describes how this shift can – and will – better prepare law students for the law practice of tomorrow.

Check out the book’s companion blog also.

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Going Publico on Faculty Pro Bono

Posted on August 7, 2008 by karenalash

In October 1999, the AALS Commission on Pro Bono and Public Service Opportunities issued its report Learning to Serve.  The Commission strongly emphasized the importance of faculty pro bono: 

“…active faculty participation in pro bono work is highly important for the sake of their students.  Law teachers teach as much about professional responsibility by what they do as by what they say.  If our conduct and actions are inconsistent with the principles and rules that we teach, we undermine both our credibility as teachers and the legitimacy of the ethical principles and rules themselves.”  

The Commission recommended “that all law schools adopt a formal policy to encourage and support faculty members to perform pro bono work.”  Unfortunately, nearly ten years later, few law schools have acted on this recommendation.

The Commission recommended six elements be included in pro bono policies:   Continue reading →

Filed under: Best Practices, Diversity & Social Justice, Catalysts For Change | Comments Off on Going Publico on Faculty Pro Bono

Liveblogging the SEALS Conference 2008: Revamping the Law School Curriculum

Posted on August 4, 2008 by Darlene

Check it out at:

http://lsi.typepad.com/lsi/2008/07/liveblogging-th.html

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Radical Reform?

Posted on August 4, 2008 by dmaranville

Check out the series of short three to five page articles on Radical Proposals to Reform Legal Pedagogy. 43 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 595-650 (2008). (Go to Articles)  You’ll find a number of Best Practices themes.

Suggestions run heavily toward  “more clinical and experiential.” That’s Erwin Chemerinsky’s pitch straight up.  Will look forward to seeing what he does at  the new UC Irvine.  Beth Cohen  sets out a similar argument dressed up in an analogy to language immersion schools.

“Most entertaining” prize?  My vote says it’s a tie.   John Henry Schlegel  argues we should admit 18 -year-olds who might tolerate the infantilizing effects of law school, or 30-year-olds, who won’t, but not 22-year-olds. Peggy Cooper Davis favors “Slaying the Three Headed Dragon” — read her piece to identify the dragon’s heads.

Filed under: Catalysts For Change | Comments Off on Radical Reform?

New Article: No Excuses Left for Failing to Reform Legal Education

Posted on July 22, 2008 by Roy Stuckey

The June/July 2008 issue of the Ohio Bar Association’s magazine, the Ohio Lawyer, focuses on “Mending Legal Education.”  http://www.scbar.org/public/pdf/mendinglegaled.pdf Two articles in the magaqzine discuss the implications of the Best Practices book and the Carnegie report.  One article was written by Nancy Rogers, President of the Association of American Law Schools. 

The other article points out that law teachers no longer have Continue reading →

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

Public Service and Professional Identity

Posted on July 15, 2008 by dmaranville

Here at the University of Washington Law School, we’re just entering our third year of the Gates Public Service Program. In addition to providing five full–ride scholarships with funding for summer jobs and a range of other support, the program provides public service programming for the entire student body. http://www.law.washington.edu/GatesScholar/ Continue reading →

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A Conversation Circle with Students on Professional Identity

Posted on July 10, 2008 by dmaranville

On returning from a women’s retreat in April where we spent some time trying to identify what we long for, I happened to open Parker Palmer’s book, A Hidden Wholeness, looking for a wonderful quote analogizing the soul to a wild animal.  (“If we want to see a wild animal, we know that the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods yelling for it to come out. But if we will walk quietly into the woods, sit patiently at the base of the tree, breathe with the earth, and fade into our surroundings, the wild creature we seek might put in an appearance.”) On the preceding page I happened to see a reference to “formation.” Continue reading →

Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Catalysts For Change, First Year Law School Innovations, Teaching Methodology | Comments Off on A Conversation Circle with Students on Professional Identity

Register for the UW’s Legal Education at the Crossroads Conference

Posted on June 25, 2008 by dmaranville

Sorry it’s taken me longer to post this than expected:  The good news:  it was my left shoulder and I’m a right-ie.  The bad news: I’m clumsy, it was a cement floor and my shoulder’s broken.  And all because my internet connection wouldn’t work and I was trying to figure out what was wrong.

You can sign up for the conference and take a look at the preliminary schedule at:

http://www.law.washington.edu/News/Articles/Default.aspx?YR=2008&ID=Crossroads

Registration closes August 22, 2008, but don’t wait to register and make your hotel reservation: The UW’s Husky football team opens their season against BYU on the conference weekend and hotel space in Seattle is going fast.

Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Best Practices, Outcomes & Assessment Techniques, Catalysts For Change, Teaching Methodology | Comments Off on Register for the UW’s Legal Education at the Crossroads Conference

Conversations on Legal and Medical Education

Posted on June 17, 2008 by dmaranville

I mentioned in my post on Curriculum Reform: Best Processes? that one of our curriculum committee “accomplishments” this year was initiating conversations.

For one of our conversations, we invited Jan Carline, Ph.D. of the University of Washington Medical School’s Department of Medical Education to talk to the committee about what they do at medical schools. Not a new topic for this blog — use the blog’s search function for “medical school” and you’ll find 6 posts by Antoinette.

The conversation was fascinating. The medical school is so much ahead of us on multiple dimensions. Three that stuck out for me were: Continue reading →

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

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