Posted on June 17, 2008 by Antoinette Sedillo Lopez
The ABA holds an associate deans conference every other year. In the past, as associate dean for clinical affairs, I looked at it, and thought it was not as relevant to my work as the clinical director’s conferences put on by the AALS. So, I had never attended the conference. However, I must say that this conference was marvelous. And, many of the sessions were really applicable to the big picture of running a law school and many issues in which clinical teachers are interested. Continue reading →
Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Best Practices for Institutional Effectiveness, Catalysts For Change, Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | Tagged: associate deans | Comments Off on 2008 ABA Associate Dean’s Conference: Changing Role of the Associate Dean
Posted on June 12, 2008 by dmaranville
In reviewing proposals submitted for the University of Washington’s conference Legal Education at the Crossroads: Ideas to Implementation Conference to be held in Seattle on Sept. 5-7, one theme that has surfaced is “process”: Continue reading →
Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Catalysts For Change | 3 Comments »
Posted on June 2, 2008 by glesnerb
The ABA Center for Professional Responsibility held the 34th Annual Conference on Professional Responsibility this past week in Boston Massachusetts. The program included a presentation entitled “Teaching Ethics and Professional Development: Legal Education at a Crossroads.” Professors Judith Wegner, Peter Joy, and I (Barbara Glesner Fines) presented the program which focused on legal education’s role in developing law students’ sense of professional identity and purpose. Professor Wegner summarized the Carnegie Report as it speaks to this issue and Professor Joy gave an overview of the Best Practices project’s discussion. Most of the session was devoted to learning from the approximately 150 judges, attorneys and law professors in attendance. The question “What is professional identity?” Continue reading →
Filed under: Catalysts For Change, Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | Comments Off on Best Practices and the Formation of Professional Identity
Posted on May 30, 2008 by Steven Friedland
The Center for Engaged Learning in the Law (CELL) of Elon Law School plans to publish a short book on law teaching and learning this fall with the Carolina Academic Press. The goal of the book is to provide a handy and concise reference guide from the perspectives of practitioners, students and teachers. Consequently, the book will feature this triumvirate of perspectives with comments and thoughts from all three groups. the rationale for combining perspectives is that for a teacher, it is relatively easy to hear what other teachers are saying, but not what students are saying, save for the end of the semester evaluations (which, by their nature, often offer only a small slice of the available feedback) — and certainly not what practitioners might be opining after they leave the academic campus. Comments on the following topics are especially desired: Continue reading →
Filed under: Catalysts For Change | Comments Off on Want to Contribute to a Book on Law Teaching and Learning?
Posted on May 29, 2008 by Antoinette Sedillo Lopez
More synchronicity in the slow but steady march to transform legal education. This email floated across the family law list serve. This is an exciting project!
Dear Colleagues:
We are pleased to announce a new initiative to help us address the integration of family law and family practice in the classroom. In this email, we describe our goals for the project and solicit your input and advice. Continue reading →
Filed under: Catalysts For Change, Technology, Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | Tagged: Family Law Education Reform Project | Comments Off on Family Law Education Reform Project
Posted on May 20, 2008 by Antoinette Sedillo Lopez
Law schools that are units within a larger university structure will be a part of the university-wide re-accreditation process. It is not unlike the ABA re-accreditation process. It involves a self-study, standards, a site visit and a report. The academic enterprise of a university is so complex that the process may involve multiple years to prepare and draft the self-study report. In an interesting synchronicity, a major criterion that the re-accreditation process focuses on is assessment. The idea is that the units should have some independent method for assessing the success of the education program. Of course, like all good bureaucracies, the university bureaucracy requested that each unit report on progress toward meeting this criterion as part of our re-accreditation process.
Because of the law school’s engagement with Carnegie and Best Practices, we were actually able to present a fairly sophisticated response to the request for evidence of meeting this criterion.
Since most law schools do not currently have an assessment plan, here is a suggestion for using the accreditation process as a catalyst to consider Best Practices for your law school. Continue reading →
Filed under: Best Practices for Institutional Effectiveness, Catalysts For Change | Tagged: higher education accreditation | Comments Off on University-wide Re-accreditation as a Catalyst for Best Practices
Posted on April 20, 2008 by Antoinette Sedillo Lopez
As we have been working on curricular planning, one of my colleagues, Laura Gomez could not attend an early meeting (I think she was at a book signing or her son’s field trip or something). With her permission, I am posting her thoughts:
Initially I’d like to thank Suellyn for turning our attention to the Carnegie report and to the Best Practices for Legal Education report. Together, the books point to deeply entrenched problems with how law schools teach and prepare students for the legal profession; they also suggest strategies for improvement. I share Suellyn’s assessment that we at the Universityof New Mexico are poised to take advantage of the cumulative wisdom presented in these studies. We are well-suited to do so for three reasons: (1) we are a highly collegial group (those of us who have come from other institutions might see this more clearly, but I think we all know it at the gut level); (2) we have a tradition of valuing teaching and truly caring about students; and (3) we have an enviable student-faculty ratio.
Reading these two books helped… Continue reading →
Filed under: Best Practices, Outcomes & Assessment Techniques, Catalysts For Change, Teaching Methodology, Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | Comments Off on A Colleague’s Thoughts on Curricular Planning
Posted on March 14, 2008 by Antoinette Sedillo Lopez
The University of Denver, Sturm College of Law is using some of the sessions in its faculty lunch series to think about and talk about the Carnegie Report and Best Practices. I spoke at a faculty lunch on March 13 about Best Practices. I asked the organizer, Laura Rovner, in advance of the presentation about whether I should assume that faculty members were familiar with the book. She said no, it would be handed out after my presentation. I decided to focus on curricular development, assessment and professionalism. So I discussed the basic principles about developing a coherent curriculum, the basic need for students to receive formative and interim assessment based on clear articulation of learning goals and I posed the question about what professionalism education might look like at their law school.
I quickly realized that Continue reading →
Filed under: Best Practices, Outcomes & Assessment Techniques, Catalysts For Change, Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | Comments Off on Building on Strengths: University of Denver Sturm College of Law and Best Practices
Posted on February 27, 2008 by Peter Joy
The International Conference on the Future of Legal Education was held recently, Feb. 20-23, and it was the most comprehensive look to date concerning new initiatives in legal education around the world. The materials from the conference are available at http://law.gsu.edu/FutureOfLegalEducationConference/index.php, and this post will briefly mention just a few of the highlights. Continue reading →
Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Best Practices & Setting Goals, Best Practices, Diversity & Social Justice, Catalysts For Change, First Year Law School Innovations, International Initiatives and Models | Comments Off on International Conference on the Future of Legal Education: Update and Report
Posted on February 20, 2008 by Steven Friedland
The theme of the CALI conference this year is transforming legal education, picking up on the Best Practices theme and the Carnegie Foundation Report, Educating Lawyers. One area where the horse already has left the barn involves learning environments. In the 20th Century, the environment was entirely linear: teachers taught, students learned, students studied in the library and then returned to class to learn some more. In the 21st Century, that linearity has disappeared and a multidimensional set of environments has taken its place. Learning is not so much a function of place anymore. Students learn on the go — have laptop or Ipod, will travel. Law school should adapt to the portability of learning in the 21st Century, encouraging TWEN, CALI, laptops and Ipod learning — because while these adaptive environments may be uncomfortable for us 20th Century dinosaurs, 21st Century students learn in this fashion.
Filed under: Catalysts For Change, Teaching Methodology, Technology, Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | 1 Comment »
Posted on February 19, 2008 by Darlene
Theme: Transforming Legal Education
“This year’s conference is all about change – transformational change. It is time to put the divisiveness of laptops in the classroom behind us. It is time to face our fears. Fear of USNews ranks, fear of the student debt implosion, fear of technology and change itself. It’s time to consider the ideas of Carnegie and decide how technology impacts professionalism and ethics in legal education. What does transformation mean to you and your institution and does technology have a central or supporting role in accomplishing our goals?” – John Mayer
Keynote Speaker is Paul Maharq
For info on the conference: http://www2.cali.org/index.php?fuseaction=conference.home
Filed under: Catalysts For Change, Technology | Tagged: legal education technology conference | Comments Off on 2008 Conference for Law School Computing
Posted on February 15, 2008 by Antoinette Sedillo Lopez
Formative feedback is giving students information about their performance to help them improve. Summative assessment is an evaluation of the student’s performance. It is useful in determining whether the student as achieved the skill or level of knowledge. Criteria referenced assessment measures whether a student as achieved a certain level of knowledge or skill. Norm referenced assessment compares students performance to each other. An example of this is when a teacher ranks student’s performance and then “curve” the grades. Outcome based assessment focuses on ensuring that students acquire and demonstrated a set of core skills and knowledge. All of this is very well explained and developed in the Carnegie Report and Best Practices. So, what does this mean in practice? Continue reading →
Filed under: Best Practices, Outcomes & Assessment Techniques, Catalysts For Change | 2 Comments »
Posted on February 8, 2008 by Robert Dinerstein
As someone who has been involved in the Best Practices project and its predecessors more or less from the beginning (though my longevity is more impressive than my substantive contributions), I am extraordinarily pleased by the publication of the book and the buzz that is creating. The essentially contemporaneous publication of Best Practices with the Carnegie Foundation report, along with the recently publicized efforts of schools such as Harvard, Stanford, Georgetown and Vanderbilt (to name but a few) to address curricular issues, and the proliferation of conferences (the Crossroads conference at University of South Carolina in November; the Stanford Carnegie conference in December; the AALS meeting in January; and the upcoming conference at Georgia State), has created an environment in which it is more possible to think about thorough-going changes in law school curriculum and pedagogy than ever before. Continue reading →
Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Catalysts For Change, Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | 3 Comments »
Posted on January 8, 2008 by Darlene
John Mayer on his CALIopolis Blog has posted the audio of the AALS Session: Rethinking Legal Education For The 21st Century. The speakers included…
- Moderator: Edward L. Rubin, Vanderbilt University Law School
- Speakers: Vicki C. Jackson, Georgetown University Law Center
- Robert Mac Crate, Esq., Senior Counsel, Sullivan and Cromwell, New York, New York
- Martha L. Minow, Harvard Law School
- Suellyn Scarnecchia, University of New Mexico School of Law
- William M. Sullivan, Senior Scholar The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Palo Alto, California
- Judith W. Wegner, University of North Carolina School of Law
If you did not attend and want to listen, click here: http://caliopolis.classcaster.org/blog/legal_education/2008/01/07/aals_carnegie
John also recorded his talk on CALI and Carnegie and included the ppt slides. To access them, click here: http://caliopolis.classcaster.org/blog/legal_education/2008/01/06/aals2008
Filed under: Catalysts For Change, Technology | 1 Comment »
Posted on January 7, 2008 by Mary A. Lynch
Many of you probably saw and read the cover of the Sunday Styles section of January 6th’s New York Times entitled: “The Falling Down Professions.” The article outlines the decrease in “happiness” of lawyers and doctors. Notably, with respect to the legal profession the article stresses that large law firms are losing associates and notes that Sullivan & Cromwell had been “hemorrhaging” associates. According to the article, attempts are being made to begin “groundbreaking” programs such as having partners say “thank you” and “good work.” WOW – what progress! Continue reading →
Filed under: Catalysts For Change | 1 Comment »
Best Practices for Legal Education 