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
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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 →
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Posted on September 17, 2008 by dmaranville
For a number of years I’ve taught a course on Access to Justice that satisfied the externship classroom component requirement. Because we are restructuring our externship program, when I taught the class spring quarter the students who were taking the class only to satisfy the requirement were moved to our new externship course.
Not surprisingly, the class drew a number of students who are planning public interest careers. But it also drew others who have made the decision to work at a firm, but want to be engaged in pro bono public service work. Many of the students were especially drawn to the portions of the course in which we talked about the law school experience and the way it shapes students career aspirations.
As I noted in my post on July 10 I’ve been struck by how hungry many our students seem to be for such conversations. Hungry for Carnegie’s “apprenticeship of professional formation,” I think. Both ideas and action on how to weave these issues into the curriculum still seem woefully undeveloped.
Note: For the last several iterations of the course, I’ve used parts of Mahoney, Calmore, and Wildman, Social Justice: Professional Communities and Law, including Chapter 4 on Personal Identity, Role, and Values: Becoming a Lawyer, Staying Yourself. I highly recommend it.
Filed under: Teaching Methodology, Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | Comments Off on More Conversations on Professional Identity
Posted on August 15, 2008 by Antoinette Sedillo Lopez
New Mexico’s clinical model is quite unusual as far as clinic models go. All of us who teach in the clinic also teach in the classroom and many faculty members rotate through the clinic. While the model has its challenges, we think the benefits far outweigh those challenges. One huge benefit is that faculty members are in touch with how the law actually affects people’s lives, particularly the lives of poor people. In Best Practices, this is called “context-based education”, ( p. 141.)
My colleague, Nathalie Martin, has blogged about some of her clinical experiences on the Credit Slips blog. You will notice that the cases and situations she describes involve clients of the clinic and the way the credit industry seems to target poor, uneducated people. Professor Martin does not just read about these issues. She lives them! Here are links to some of her blogs:
Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Best Practices for Institutional Effectiveness, Teaching Methodology | Tagged: context based education | Comments Off on Law Professors and Context-Based Education: The Clinic and the Classroom
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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Posted on July 27, 2008 by Antoinette Sedillo Lopez
Jay Pottenger from Yale and Beryl Blaustone from CUNY gave two of the keynote presentations at the recent International Clinical Conference in Ireland. The theme of the conference was “Lighting the Fire: The Many Roles of Clinical Legal Education”. (Wonderful conference by the way, kudos to the organizers!).
An exciting thing about the American presentations was the leadership,,, from MacCrate, to Best Practices and Carnegie. And, while we complain that law schools in the U.S. have not implemented MacCrate as you would expect from such an important report, nearly every law school in the U.S. now has some form of client-service clinic. It turns out that an important report was published in the United Kingdom by the Lord Chancellor’s Committee for Education and Conduct in 1996 and was followed in 2001 by the Law Society of England and Wales proposing a new legal educational framework to teach law students knowlege, skills and ethics. In the wake of these two important reports, some law schools in the United Kingdom responded by including more simulation courses in the curriculum. Professor Pottenger’s presentation focused on the superiority of client-service clinical models to simulation programs, particular in imparting training on ethics and building on student motivation. Professor Beryl Blaustone did a masterful job of demonstrating her techniques for providing meaningful feedback to students in a client- service clinical program. Her technique of asking the student to identify their own issues with their performance and using that as the springboard for the feedback session is very effective. Her presentation demonstrated that there are simply some things that can only be taught through the supervison and feedback process in a client-service clinic.
This two-day conference included a wealth of papers and from many jurisdictions addressing the philosophy and techniques of clinical legal education in law schools in many countries. It was a stimulating conference and the Best Practices book was often mentioned. I was really proud of the leadership that American clinical legal teachers demonstrated at this important conference. And the two keynotes by Beryl Blaustone and Jay Pottenger did all clinical teachers from the United States proud! The conference web page is here: http://www.numyspace.co.uk/~unn_mlif1/school_of_law/IJCLE/
Next year’s International Clinical Conference will be in July in Australia!
Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Teaching Methodology, Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | Tagged: international clinical legal education | Comments Off on Two American Keynotes at International Clinical Conference in Cork, Ireland
Posted on July 14, 2008 by Margaret Moore Jackson
I hate to be one of the first to mention it, but it feels like summer is waning. As much as I love what I do during the academic year, summer break never seems long enough to catch up on what gets back-burnered by the demands of teaching – in my case, teaching students within the context of litigation. Maybe I’m jumping the gun in sensing the nearness of fall. But I’m working on my syllabus. Continue reading →
Filed under: Best Practices, Outcomes & Assessment Techniques, Teaching Methodology | 1 Comment »
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 →
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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.
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Posted on June 23, 2008 by Antoinette Sedillo Lopez
Since I shared the first couple of emails in the current debate at UNM about laptops, I asked Alfred Mathewson if I could share his response. He is working on using the lap tops as a teaching tool!
“I am probably moving in the opposite direction of most of my colleagues here and in most law schools. I am experimenting with the laptops. While I am concerned about the extent to which they may be used to distract students, I think we must conceive of laptops as something more than notepads. In many classes, notetaking is the only pedagogical use of the laptop. I have been experimenting with other uses in the classroom. If the laptops are going to be in the classroom, we should make use of them. I am currently reviewing an online interactive casebook for Civil Procedure in case I teach it again. In Contracts this fall, I plan to experiment with bringing my laptop to class rather than using the big screen for Power Point presentations. I will use a TWEN course site. They will be able to annotate the PowerPoint but they will have no need to spend course time copying the slides. They will, however, have to use the laptop to see the PowerPoint. As I see it, we must prepare students to practice in an era far more technologically advanced than the one in which we were educated.”
Filed under: Teaching Methodology, Technology, Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | Tagged: laptops in the classroom | 2 Comments »
Posted on June 22, 2008 by Antoinette Sedillo Lopez
My colleague Rob Schwartz is addressing the laptop issue in New Mexico this summer while teaching in the Pre Law Summer Program for Indian Students (PLSI) run by the Indian Law Center. Here is his response to Sergio Pareja’s email (described in my last post). Continue reading →
Filed under: Teaching Methodology, Technology, Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | Tagged: laptops in classroom | Comments Off on More on Laptops in the Classroom
Posted on June 20, 2008 by Antoinette Sedillo Lopez
One of my colleagues from the University of New Mexico, Sergio Pareja is here in Guanajuato teaching International Business Transactions. He wrote the following email to our faculty about laptop use in the classroom. I thought it would be of interest to other classroom teachers, so I asked him if I could share it with this blog. He agreed. Continue reading →
Filed under: Teaching Methodology, Technology, Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | Tagged: laptops in classroom | 1 Comment »
Posted on June 17, 2008 by Antoinette Sedillo Lopez
One of the great things about teaching in the Guanajuato Summer Law Institute is the opportunity to meet professors from our partner law schools. At our mid-day comida today, Professor Jorge Ramirez from Texas Tech talked about his approach to providing interim feedback in his International Business and International Law courses. During the semester he gives the students problems that he asks them to work on in groups of two or three. The problems are designed to cover the material fairly comprehensively. Each of the groups is assigned a different problem and they are required to provide a written analysis of the problem to Professor Ramirez. Then, he reviews the students’ written responses to the problems and then MEETS with each small group to give them feedback on their first draft. They are asked to take his feedback and rewrite the answer to the problem. Professor Ramirez then shares the re-writes with the whole class. Professor Ramirez thus provides formative feedback that the students take very seriously since they know that their work will be shared with their colleagues. He has the opportunity to assess the students learning and make adjustments during the semester to ensure that the students grasp the material and can discuss and analyze the problems effectively. What a neat idea!
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Posted on June 4, 2008 by Darlene
At the conclusion of our second year of using “clickers” (the CPS system from eInstruction) in several classes at Albany Law School, I asked students in the Criminal Law class what they thought… Continue reading →
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Posted on June 3, 2008 by andicurcio
I teach the second half of a year-long first-year civil procedure class. We spend the semester reading and interpreting the Fed. R. of Civ. P. Throughout the semester, I give the students hypothetical questions that require them to read and interpret the applicable Federal Rules. This semester, I wanted to see if I could assess how well students learned how to read and interpet statutes. The assessment was motivated, in part, by my desire to assess a broader range of skills than are normally covered in essay exams.
As a small part of a 72-hour take-home exam, I gave students two short answer questions that required them to read Fed. R. of Civ. P that we had not covered in class and to answer two straightforward questions. Using the fact pattern that served as the basis for the essay question, I asked students: #1: Who must be served with this Answer?; #2: On what date must you file and serve your Answer?
Much to my dismay, Continue reading →
Filed under: Best Practices, Outcomes & Assessment Techniques, Teaching Methodology | 3 Comments »
Best Practices for Legal Education 
