Best Practices for Legal Education

The Legal Writing Institute, the Association of Legal Writing Directors, the Legal Writing, Reasoning, and Research Section of the Association of American Law Schools and Fordham Law School are hosting a first of its kind Scholars & Scholarship Workshop on Wednesday, January 6, 2016 (immediately preceding this year’s AALS conference).  There is no charge to attend and registration is open at Joint Workshop Registration. The registration deadline is December 1, 2015.  The full Joint Workshop Program is here.

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We are in the season of Thanksgiving.  I hope that all of us can step back, take a breath, and reflect on our blessings as we head into the Thanksgiving weekend, to be followed very soon by the yearly challenges of preparing and grading fall term exams.

Here are some of the things I am thankful for at this time in 2015:

1. Legal educators are becoming more knowledgeable and committed to innovative teaching and assessment methods than ever.  I attended the assessment conference at Whittier Law School that was the subject of Barbara Glesner-Fines earlier post on this blog.  I must say it was among the best conferences I have ever attended.  We had numerous examples of exemplary teaching from around the country (among my favorites were Andi Curcio, Judy Daar, Cassandra Hill, Susan Simpson, Patricia Leary, Andrea Funk, and Barry Currier… but it is hard to call out favorites since all were excellent).  I particularly give thanks for David Thomson’s reminder that not that long ago, he and his colleagues at the University of Denver School of Law hosted a conference on assessment that pushed the envelope.  What a long way we have come.

2. Legal educators are asking the challenging questions about the ways in which bar exams (particularly those developed by the National Conference of Bar Examiners) are or are not assessing what needs to be assessed through national and state bar examinations.  There is a growing realization that deeper dialogue is needed since it appears that the National Conference is employing important statistical standards for assuring the integrity of their examinations, but that such standards are not enough to assure that examinations actually test student capacity to serve as competent lawyers in the public interest.

3. Clinical, legal writing, and traditional faculty members have been coming together to ask challenging questions and to offer deep insights about legal education.  This year has seen the publication of “Building on Best Practices” under the leadership of Debbie Maranville, Lisa Radtke Bliss, Carolyn Wilkes Kaas and Antoinette Sedillo Lopez.  This publication is free to legal educators, thanks to the support of the book’s publisher, Lexis.  There are many insights that are freely shared in this publication and faculties across the country and abroad should give careful attention to the insights by numerous faculty members collected there.

4. Students are increasingly choosing to attend law school for the right reasons.  They recognize that the point is not merely to gain high-paying jobs, but rather to bring justice to the world around them.  Hats off, as well, to decision makers in the federal government who have worked over the years to develop new strategies for repaying student loans based on income, in order to help students and graduates pursue the work they believe to be import in the greater good.

5. I give thanks for the strong and generous individuals who have stepped up to serve as presidents, deans and associate deans during this challenging time in legal education.  It is not easy to juggle the many issues before us, ranging from internal budget challenges to external political pressures, to navigation of demands that law graduates be “practice ready.”  My own list of those to whom and for whom I give thanks are UNC President Tom Ross (UNC JD), former UNC Law Dean Jack Boger (UNC JD), current UNC Law Martin Brinkley (UNC JD), and Associate Dean Jeff Hirsch, among many others around the country.  Leadership jobs in this era are not easy ones.  They take courage, smarts, and equinimity.  We should all give thanks to those who provide important leadership in extremely challenging times.

6. Congratulations to President Obama, a distinguished legal educator in his own right.  I have never been prouder than when I see him call for thoughtful and careful resettlement of Syrian refugees in the United States.  Those who came to the United States and met its indigenous peoples did so in part as refugees seeking to worship as they chose.  Now, endangered people from Syria and the Middle East are similarly seeking a chance to raise their families in peace.  We should respect the religious freedoms of others and their need for safe harbor in an increasingly dangerous world.  We thank our colleague, President Obama, and wish him well in his efforts to bring reason to bear in this very emotional time.

7. Please, if you can, post your own grounds for thanksgiving.  This is my favorite holiday of the year, and I hope our collective sense of gratitude will live on every day of the year.  Taking a moment to reflect and recognizing those who help us collectively move forward in the interest of justice is time well-spent.

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The Carnegie Report, which criticized traditional legal education, designated three “apprenticeships” for educating today’s lawyers: 1) the “cognitive apprenticeship,” which focuses on expert knowledge and modes of thinking, 2) the “apprenticeship of practice,” which educates students in “the forms of expert practice shared by competent practitioners,” and 3) the “apprenticeship of identity and purpose,” which “introduces students to the purposes and attitudes that are guided by the values for which the professional community is responsible.”  Since the Carnegie Report, numerous authors have published texts intended to develop “the apprenticeship of practice.”  However, until now, there have been no texts that covered the “apprenticeship of identity and purpose.”

In “Developing Your Professional Identity: Creating Your Inner Lawyer” (2015), I have taken a new approach to learning professional ethics and professional identity.  Traditionally, legal ethics professors have taught students the ethical rules, cases that interpreted the rules, and how to apply the rules to facts.  In other words, legal ethics was taught exactly like contracts, torts, and property.  Professional identity is more than knowing how to apply ethical rules.  It is personal; it involves the inner person (your moral compass).   Professional identity is a lawyer’s personal morality, values, decision-making process, and self-consciousness in relation to the practices of the legal profession.  It provides the framework that a lawyer uses to make all a lawyer’s decisions.

My book takes a variety of approaches to help law students develop their professional identities. Chapter One asks students to take a close look at themselves by asking questions about their childhood, their college years, and who they are today.  Chapters Two (Becoming a Self-Regulated Learner), Six (Overcoming Cognitive Biases), and Seven (Attorney Well-Being) give students the tools they will need to develop their professional identities. Chapter Two also introduces students to “practical wisdom,” an important approach to understanding and solving ethical problems. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 deal with professional identity within certain topics–the attorney-client relationship, the lawyer and society, and attorney advertising and solicitation of clients. Chapter Eight presents the legal profession’s and society’s views on lawyers and the legal profession. Chapter Nine focuses on the student’s role as a lawyer. It asks students what area of law they want to practice, how they will deal with clients, their place in the legal profession, standards of civility in the legal profession, and working with subordinates. Finally, Chapter Ten contains a variety of extended problems to help students further develop their professional identities.

Students can use this book either an independent study text, or professors can adopt it as a classroom text.

For too long now, legal education has focused on learning to think like a lawyer and memorizing legal rules.  It is time to learn how to be a lawyer.

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 Editors of the ABA Journal announced today they have selected BEST PRACTICES FOR LEGAL EDUCATION as one of the top 100 best blogs for a legal audience.

“For us, at the ABA Journal, this isn’t just another award. We view our annual list as service to our readers, pointing them to a collection of some of the very best legal writing and commentary on the Web. Yes, we hope those selected are proud of it. But we also hope that our readers will recognize the list itself as another portal to some very vivid, informative and entertaining conversations about issues we all care about.”

Grateful appreciation to assistant editor Jessica Persaud for her strong administrative, communication and writing skills and  to Eileen “Nina” Roepe for her technological  troubleshooting.   Congratulations also to all the collegial contributors who make this blog current and interesting!

About the ABA Journal:

The ABA Journal is the flagship magazine of the American Bar Association, and it is read by half of the nation’s 1.1 million lawyers every month. It covers the trends, people and finances of the legal profession from Wall Street to Main Street to Pennsylvania Avenue. ABAJournal.com features breaking legal news updated as it happens by staff reporters throughout every business day, a directory of more than 4,000 lawyer blogs, and the full contents of the magazine.

About the ABA:

With nearly 400,000 members, the American Bar Association is the largest voluntary professional membership organization in the world. As the national voice of the legal profession, the ABA works to improve the administration of justice, promotes programs that assist lawyers and judges in their work, accredits law schools, provides continuing legal education, and works to build public understanding around the world of the importance of the rule of law.

Thank you to our readers who care deeply about legal education and who  are interested in finding ways to improve it!

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At the Conference on Building an Assessment Plan from the Ground Up, Professor Judith Daar of Whittier Law School presented her journey through assessment from “Reluctant Assessor” to a professor who values assessment. Professor Daar described how she first began thinking about assessment in the context of Assisted Reproductive Technology. She described for the audience the effects of statutory requirements that doctors be required to report multiple births resulting from IVF and the effect of that “assessment” in lowering IVF multiple births. Having seen that assessment makes a difference in medical settings, she was then ready to try some assessment in her own classroom. She created a pre- and post-test survey instrument in adverse possession unit that was intended to assess preparedness and comprehension. In creating this approach to assessment, she drew on the model required to award continuing education credit in medical education. While in the pre-test, many students accurately stated the holding in an adverse possession case, but after her class in which she criticized the court’s opinion, with the intent that students would learn critical analysis. However, her post-test demonstrated that many students thought that critique meant that they had misstated the holding in the case. Thus, she was surprised to see that she thought she was teaching a skill of critical analysis but the results caused her to realize that the students thought that in modeling that critique she was teaching substance. This caused her to realize how much students relied on the didactic of the classroom to “deliver the law” – that they do not trust their own ability to learn. A fascinating challenge !

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More from the Building an Assessment Plan from the Ground Up Conference:

Dean Susan Duncan, Dean and Professor of Law at the University of Louisville Louis D. Brandeis School of Law, presented from the dean’s perspective on assessment. She began her remarks by reinforcing the notion that all faculty have to be involved. She noted her concern that the conference is largely attended by legal writing professors and the disproportionate number of women at the conference and urged attendees to be sure that this does not become a service obligation that is “farmed out” to female faculty and legal writing faculty. She also noted the few number of deans in the audience, reiterating the message that deans must be fully supportive of assessment for it to be successful.

Dean Duncan noted that the new accreditation requirements (referring to both assessment and the experiential course requirement) will have an impact on resources, including:
• Devoting of new faculty positions to teach the experiential learning courses
• Paying stipends for field-work supervisors
• Training faculty for increased skills teaching or for better assessment
• Increasing teaching assistants (research assistants are a usual part of the law school environment, but she suggested that teaching assistants may become a more important part)
• Bringing in outside advisors or consultants
• Reducing teaching and service loads to assist faculty in transitioning to the new environment of assessment and skills instruction
In addition, the positive resource result may be that Deans can use the results from assessment plans in fundraising.
She suggested that one of the many benefits of assessment may be the increased formation of professional learning communities in law schools, in which faculty with shared interests will work together to share assessment practices and data.

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More good stuff from the Building an Assessment Plan conference today: Maryann Jones, Dean Emerita, Western State College of Law, and Educational Consultant, spoke of the “paradigm shift” that legal education faces from a focus on teaching and faculty to a focus on student learning and accomplishments. Dean Jones related her experience in having to make that shift early on because her law school was an independent free-standing law school accredited by the regional accreditor and so was not “given a pass” on assessment as are many law schools that are part of larger university systems. She noted, however, that increasingly regional accreditors are paying attention to law schools, with more than one accreditation report noting that “The law school lags substantially behind the rest of the institution in terms of assessment of student learning.”

She provided a list of very helpful hints in building an assessment plan:

• The plan has to be an integral part of the whole institution, not housed in an “assessment office” and not only in the curriculum, but must also include student services and co-curricular programs.
• There must be an institutional commitment of resources
• The faculty must own assessment. The plan must be built from the ground up, from the beginning, led by the faculty. You cannot simply hand the faculty a plan and tell them to “implement it” She emphasized the importance of one-on-one and small group conversations to develop that plan.
• One size does not fit all. An assessment plan cannot be “plug and play” but must address its own mission and within its own resources and culture. On the other hand, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There are many good models that can provide a starting point.
• Be creative. Work with what you have.
• Do not make too many learning outcomes. Keep it manageable.
• Get training. Regional accreditation programs often provide good training. There are great books available.
• When you start the dialogue on assessment, bring in a facilitator who is familiar with assessment in the law school context.
• Do not underestimate student involvement. Talk about student learning outcomes in classes. Widely disseminate your program learning outcomes.
• Include institutional research – assessment is data driven, so you have to determine how you are going to gather that data from the beginning.
• Close the loop on assessment. How will you use your results. Is it on the agenda of faculty meetings? Do you have quality improvement or action plan at the end of an assessment cycle? Do you regularly conduct program review (comprehensive review periodically)?

Thank you Maryann!

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In the morning session of the conference on Building an Assessment Plan from the Ground Up, presenters shared an overview of assessment in action.

Professor Andrea Curcio, Professor of Law and Co-director Externship Program at Georgia State University College of Law, presented on “The Purposes of Assessment” by providing two powerful examples of how assessment challenges faculty to change and improve their teaching. The first of these targeted a learning outcome of developing cultural sensitivity. She described challenging survey results from her law school regarding student ability to perceive their own cultural lens and the teaching challenges those results presented. The second was the learning outcome of analytical reasoning and her efforts in her civil procedure class to improve student skill through formative feedback. For both of these, Andrea has published articles that provide resources and analysis of these assessments.

Professor Vicki VanZandt of the University of Dayton School of Law and Professor Kelley Mauerman of Whittier Law School presented a primer on “Assessment 101” including much of the language of assessment, providing examples from their own schools off their curricular planning process.  They emphasized the importance of starting small and building an assessment plan from activities faculty already engage in. They reminded the audience that not every outcome needs to be assessed every year, providing examples of their law school’s own curriculum maps and assessment plans. Read the learning outcomes and performance criteria from Dayton here: https://www.udayton.edu/law/_resources/documents/academics/learning-outcomes-and-performance-criteria.pdf and from Whittier here:

https://www.law.whittier.edu/index/experience/mission-and-goals/institutional-goals/

Professor VanZandt is the co-author of Student Learning Outcomes and Law School Assessment: A Practical Guide to Measuring Institutional Effectiveness (Carolina Academic Press 2015) available for purchase here: http://www.cap-press.com/books/isbn/9781611632668/Student-Learning-Outcomes-and-Law-School-Assessment

More resources will be available, including slideshows and handouts from the conference.  Keep watching!

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The conference on “Building an Assessment Plan from the Ground Up” is being held today at Whittier Law School. Professor Andrea Funk, Associate Dean for Lawyering Skills and Institutional Assessment
Professor of Lawyering Skills at Whittier, has created a comprehensive program for the sold-out crowd of faculty, most of whom have some responsibility for assessment planning at their law schools. For your use and enjoyment, I will be blogging from the conference today. Professor Judith Wegner,  Burton Craige Professor of Law at the University of North Carolina School of Law, began asking us to all think about words that begin with “A” and reflect on how many of those are disagreeable: aspirin, ache, anger, accreditation, assessment! She provided a powerful overview of three of these “A-words” that many faculty find very foreign: pressures for accountability in accreditation processes that require assessment of student learning outcomes. You can read more about the history and context of accreditation here:  .  Download her slideshow here (scroll to “Assessment”).

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Law schools working to provide students with substantial pro bono opportunities may look beyond traditional public interest firms, legal services providers, or governmental agencies. The idea of allowing students to assist in representing pro bono clients at private firms is appealing. What a great way to encourage and expand the pro bono efforts of the local bar, while helping students develop professionalism and an understanding of a lawyer’s responsibility to the community! Typically, the bench and bar love the idea. Such programs could provide much-needed legal services to persons of limited means, while reinforcing and modeling the importance of pro bono legal service.

But among the challenges to creating these programs at for-profit firms is the need to clearly distinguish such arrangements from an employment relationship. Similar issues arise when law schools explore the possibility of field placement programs at for-profit firms. Cautious directors of field placement and pro bono programs have been watching these issues develop, as the U.S. Department of Labor and the ABA have traded correspondence in an effort to provide clarity.

Recent federal court decisions have cast doubt on whether the DOL’s interpretation of the issue will be followed. In Schumann v. Collier Anesthesia, the Eleventh Circuit sided with a prior ruling by the Second Circuit, putting aside some of the concerns of the DOL.  As reported in the National Law Journal:

On September 11, 2015, the Eleventh Circuit became the first appellate court to address the standard for lawful unpaid internships since the Second Circuit’s ruling in Glatt et al. v. Fox Searchlight Pictures, Inc. et al. The new decision adopts the Glatt test and reasoning wholesale, and provides helpful guidance on applying the Glatt factors. The case also strengthens the trend away from relying on the DOL’s Fact Sheet 71, which purports to provide restrictive guidance on unpaid internships. ….

Echoing the Second Circuit in Glatt, the Eleventh Circuit disagreed with the SRNAs and rejected the DOL’s six-factor test. As a threshold matter, the court noted that because the six-factor test is not a regulation it is only due deference “proportional to its power to persuade.” The court “[did] not find it persuasive.”

Does this change anything? Now what?

We want to provide opportunities for students to participate in well-structured field placement programs and for them to engage in introductory pro bono work. Private firms are perhaps not the best place for this, but many law schools need to see whether somehow it can be made to work – serving the educational needs of the students while improving the provision of pro bono legal services.

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Dear Colleagues,

The AALS Balance Section invites you to participate in a topic call about lawyer well-being and satisfaction, with Prof. Larry Krieger presenting his findings and data from 6200 lawyers in 4 states.  As you will see, the findings may have important implications for who is genuinely “successful” in law school, and consequently for how and what we teach as well.  Here are the details.  Please forward this invitation to your colleagues.

What:

AALS Balance Section Topic Call: New Lawyer Well-being Research: An Imperative to Redefine “Success” for our Students?  Presented by Prof. Larry Krieger

When:  

October 9, 2015, 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. PST

Call-in #:

(712) 432-1500, access code 1062814#

Readings:

Please see the topic discussion below and attached PowerPoint slides that may be viewed here:

Krieger Topic Call-AALS Balance

HappyLwr stdtBrief3 15 (Professor Krieger uses the linked slides here in presentations for students and lawyers, and is fine with others downloading them for similar use.)

Format:

Presentation by our speaker Larry Krieger, followed by discussion

Topic:            

New Well-being Research: An Imperative to Redefine “Success” for our Students?

Hello all.  I’m delighted to be part of the topic call programs sponsored by our Section on Balance in Legal Education.   The call will be based on findings from my study with Dr. Ken Sheldon, now published (83 Geo. Wash. L.R.) and also viewable in final form at:  http://ssrn.com/abstract=2398989  .  The paper documents our data from 6200 lawyers in four states, and sheds light on the apparent contributions of many kinds of factors to the well-being and satisfaction of those lawyers.

Perhaps the most important pattern and overall finding is that the objective factors typically associated with “success” for a law student or lawyer in our society show weak (even nil in some cases) relationships with lawyer happiness. At the same time, these factors (including, for example, grades/class rank, law review membership, affluence/income, law school debt, USNWR law school ranking, and making partner in a law firm) are all competitive and therefore anxiety-inducing.  Indeed, most of the stress and depression/discouragement among law students and lawyers is typically attributed to such factors.

Complementing these findings, the data also highlight several non-competitive, personal and subjective factors (including authenticity/integrity, altruistic and community values, close relationships, and passion for one’s chosen work) to be the actual, quite powerful determinants of lawyer happiness and satisfaction.

These and related findings should, I believe, lead us to question the very definition of “success” and “quality of life” shared by our and other modern cultures. Since the dominant paradigm of “success” determines the life priorities, focus, and primary effort of most people, if that paradigm does not bring happiness do we decide that it is flawed or dysfunctional?  If so, how might educators (especially legal educators for this discussion) effectively impart this information and thereby shift the priorities of their students?

I hope you can take at least a quick look at the study report before the call, but if not please do join us regardless.  And while all thoughts are welcome, I hope we can focus on two fundamental questions:

**What do you consider the most important or meaningful finding(s)?

**Do you see a way to use one or more of the findings in your work with students or lawyers, whether teaching, counseling, advising, or mentoring?  (You may already be working in this area, or may have ideas for how you might in view of these findings now.)

I will provide a brief summary of the findings, and look forward to hearing as many thoughts and voices as possible given our time.

Best and thanks to all, Larry

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Courtesy of  Instructional Technology at Albany Law School

Recently, Campus Technology polled hundreds of education professionals to ask them which products they think are truly the best.     To see what they thought click here.

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You can decide whether to merely survive the experience or thrive by refusing to “compare and despair.”

Lawrence Krieger, The National Law Journal

September 28, 2015

Welcome to law school. You just started, and the legendary stress of law school may well be giving you a lot to worry about already. There’s the work, the competition, the other really smart students, the loans to pay off, the job fears. How do you survive and keep yourself together for the next few years?

If you are among the many who feel this way, I’m here to tell you that whether this anxiety dominates your life or recedes into the background is a matter of your choice. In short, you have a daily decision, beginning now: You can stress and worry about how to survive law school, or you can plan to thrive in law school. There is no predestined “law school stress” experience, despite what you may be constantly hearing. Your classmates are going to have contrasting experiences. What will yours be like?

Twenty-three years of teaching tells me that many of you will have a challenging but generally enjoyable time in law school, while many others will be dominated by angst, pressure and stress during the same years. The simple but usually hidden truths are, first, the quality of your experience will be the result of your beliefs, and, second, with accurate information you can change your beliefs and thus absolutely change your experience. What will yours be like?

I am not suggesting a New Age or wishful-thinking approach but a scientific reality that is borne out by published studies of law students and lawyers in the United States. Let’s take a look at a few of the critical attitudes and beliefs that will provide you either a thriving or surviving experience.

As a foundation, we can agree that law school will be demanding and you will need to work hard. There is a lot to learn, including a relatively new way of using your analytical abilities to “think like a lawyer.” (A quick side note though: the mystique around that style of thinking is often overdone, and you will learn the skill quickly in your regular classes.)

The natural challenges of law school bring up your first key decision point. The “surviving” attitude that is so common is based on what psychologists call extrinsic motivations and values. They include typically competitive things outside yourself, such as income, grades and comparison with other people and a pessimistic expectation.

Survival thinking goes like this: “Oh my God, law school is so hard, everybody is so smart, my profs are so knowledgeable. How will I measure up? My loans will be so much, how can I get those few jobs that will cover my needs?” This attitude will naturally drive you to constant worry, late nights and studying most of the weekend, and pervasive self-doubt about your ability to compete for grades and ultimately get a job.

This approach to law school is common, and it is exhausting, but where is all this stress coming from? It is your belief system, not the work. You have bought into the messages that you have to do better than the other students, have to look smart and in control all the time, won’t get a job if you aren’t in the top of the class — and the result of failure will be a nightmarish life. With this belief system, survival anxiety becomes a nearly constant reality that clouds your enjoyment and undercuts your performance, despite the fact that the schoolwork itself is doable and that learning could be inherently enjoyable.

The “thriving” attitude is quite contrary, and you all will encounter students who naturally adopt it. It focuses more on intrinsic motivations — including self-improvement and growth, and relating to, helping and being in community with others — and optimistic expectations.

It goes like this: “I have been successful in my life so far and am a smart person who gained acceptance to this law school. Whatever the future holds, I will be fine. There is no reason to assume life is turning bad on me. I am here to learn as much as I can that will translate into practicing law later; I will apply myself to learning without paying much attention to my grades and class rank, and will try to find my greatest interests for legal work. I will start early with practical steps to support a job search. There is a lot more to me than my grades, no matter what they are. I can do internships and clinics, volunteer, engage in extracurriculars that play to my personal strengths, network with our alums and other lawyers, and build my resume intelligently for the kind of jobs I most want. Then I’ll get busy early seeking a job, and trust the process to take its course.”

There are some crucial differences for your stress level built into these intrinsic and the extrinsic approaches. It will be difficult in one sense to take the intrinsic and optimistic approach, because you need the resolve to go against the common fears and negative storylines about law school. But it will be much harder on you to take the extrinsic approach because of the inherent differences in the two sets of choices and motivations.

First, the extrinsic, comparative/competitive approach is inherently anxiety-producing. It focuses on zero-sum outcomes so there is a “loser” for every “winner,” and you are always either better or worse off than someone else. It also means you always feel insecure and that you lack control in your life, because these external results depend on what other people do as much or more than on what you do.

Conversely, the intrinsic approach keeps you focused on what you do and what you can do, which generates a sense of control and optimism. After all, we humans universally face uncertainty about next year and even tomorrow.

Start openly accepting that reality now and deal with it constructively by focusing most of your attention on what you can do today to advance intrinsic goals that are in your control (i.e., learning, self-improvement, relating well and helping others). That is your best foundation for law school and for life. As you increasingly focus on building now toward worthy goals, you waste less of your time and emotional resources on worrying about the future.

The research also shows that, with these attitudes, you will actually learn more and test and grade better — a true win-win result from choosing wisely where to put your attention in law school.

NOTE:  Drawn from the booklet “Hidden Sources of Law School Street” available from Lawrence Krieger (lkrieger@law.fsu.edu), professor at Florida State University College of Law.

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Studies find that active learning methodologies benefit all students, but the greatest benefits may be to women, minorities, low-income and first generation students. See : http://nyti.ms/1i6FRW5   As the NY Times reports, one study found “the active-learning approach worked disproportionately well for black students — halving the black-white achievement gap evident in the lecture course — and for first-generation college students, closing the gap between them and students from families with a history of college attendance.” The studies cited in this NY Times article provide support for increasing active learning in legal education, both to improve all students’ learning and to level the playing field.

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