Best Practices for Legal Education

BLOG POST Authored by:
Mayer, Connie
Interim Associate Dean for Academic Affairs; Raymond and Ella Smith Distinguished Professor of Law
Albany Law School

I just returned from the 2015 AALS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. this past weekend where I had the honor of helping to plan the session entitled, “Integrating Clinical Pedagogy Across the Curriculum: Making it Work.” The session was co-sponsored by the Section on Clinical Legal Education and the Section on Teaching Methods. A panel of very dedicated law faculty highlighted how clinical methods can be used effectively in non-clinical courses to enhance learning. Two panelists, Professor Alice Abreu (Temple) and Professor Ray Brescia (Albany), described their use of live clients in teaching Tax Policy and Practice and Law and Social Innovation. They highlighted their use of clinical methods including problem-solving in a real world setting, reflection, and live client interaction. Three panelists, Professor Kenneth Klein (California Western), Professor Nicole Iannarone (Georgia State), and Professor Brian Krumm (Tennessee), discussed their use of simulations, reflection, professional role plays, and collaborative learning in teaching their courses (Representing Enterprises, Professional Responsibility, and Civil Procedure, respectively).

Given the new focus on experiential learning, both from the ABA and from employers seeking to hire graduates who are more ready to take on their professional roles, the burden (and reward) of seeing students develop their professional identity through clinical methodology cannot be solely on the shoulders of the clinic, though the clinic will remain the focal point for experiential learning. There is “added value,” however, if faculty teaching non-clinical courses also adopt some of the clinic methods that are known to promote deeper learning.

The session raised some very interesting questions that we need to continue to explore. If simulations are used in a non-clinical course, how much time should be devoted to teaching the skill being used? For example, if students are asked to negotiate a problem with the goal of enhancing their understanding of the subject matter area, how are they taught about the process of negotiation? If individual faculty members integrate certain clinical methods, how are they coordinated with one another and with the work of the clinic? Are the courses sequenced (or can they be) so that students begin to learn skills and develop a professional identity in a more intensely supervised setting and then move on to non-clinical courses where they can practice those skills in a less supervised setting? How can the success described by the panelists be used to promote broader curricular change?

As a former clinical teacher, I use clinical methods in my non-clinical courses and I find them rewarding and an important way to enhance learning. As the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, I encourage faculty to use clinical methods in non-clinical courses. But there is a need to coordinate these individual efforts and think through how to place in order the opportunities for experiential learning that we offer. We are lucky to house the Center for Excellence in Law Teaching, directed by Professor Mary Lynch, who organizes regular workshops on teaching that provide a platform for discussion of these issues. The clinical conference in the spring on “The New Normal” will also help us continue this conversation.

Thanks to our wonderful moderator, Professor Jane Aiken (Georgetown), to committee member Professor Lisa Reel Schmidt, and to our hard-working co-chairs, Professor Joy Radice (Tennessee) and Professor Spencer Rand (Temple) for a very inspirational session!

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As the semester comes to a close it is a fantastic opportunity to reflect on your teaching strategies and what worked and what did not. If you have thought about introducing blended learning with in-class instruction this upcoming spring consider joining LegalED for our upcoming webinar Flipping of the Law Classroom: Infusing Active Learning through Technology on Friday, December 12th at 2:00-2:45 pm EST.

Fill out this form if you wish to participate as we have limited open slots.

Jeremiah Ho of University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Law will be leading this webinar and we are thrilled and honored to work with him!  Jeremiah shined in our Igniting Law Teaching Conference this past April. You can see his presentation, “Not Your Father’s Case Method: Bringing Skills into Doctrinal Courses” here (If you are interested in presenting at our 2015 Igniting Law Teaching Conference visit our Call for Talks)

Again the webinar Friday, December 12^th from 2:00 – 2:45pm EST.  If you are interested in participating, please fill out this form so I can reserve your slot.

We will be using GoToMeeting software and will be sending sign-in information before the webinar.

We hope you can join us for the free webinar!

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Educational videos are becoming one of the most popular online learning formats in K-12 and higher education.  The semester break is a great time to start thinking about how to make educational videos for your courses.

Since last year, I have been working with law professors to begin to incorporate educational videos into legal education.   Together with FWD.us, a group of law professors recently launched a series of educational videos on immigration law and additional videos are currently being produced.  The videos were made by several law professors from a host of law schools, including: Lenni Benson (NYLS), Amanda Frost (AU), Lindsay Harris (Georgetown), Cesar Cuauhtemoc Garcia Hernandez (Denver), Laila Hlass (BU), Hiroshi Motomura (UCLA), Michael Olivas (U of Houston), Jayesh Rathod (AU), Philip Schrag (Georgetown), Ragini Shah (Suffolk), Juliet Stumpf (Lewis and Clark), Shoba Wadhia (Penn State), Virgil Wiebe (University of St. Thomas), and Michael Wishnie (Yale).

I learned a lot from making these and other educational videos on law and law teaching.  Many of my colleagues have asked for advice on how to get started.  Over the next 3 blog posts I will detail the 3 easy ways to produce educational videos for legal education together with some lessons learned. The three posts will be on (1) Voiceover Powerpoint/Keynote Slideshow, (2) Screencasting (3) Whiteboard Animated Videos.

Voiceover Powerpoint/Keynote Slideshow

Both Powerpoint and Keynote allow you to record yourself talking over each slide in a slideshow.  It is quite easy to record an audio narration over a Powerpoint or Keynote slideshow.  Open the slideshow on your computer and speak about each slide at your normal pace.  As you move through the slideshow, your voice is recorded.  Then, when you are done, save the presentation as a movie, a function available on both Powerpoint and Keynote.  Here are useful articles about recording narrations over slideshows.

• Powerpoint help article
• Keynote help article

If you use Prezi, the program does not have an embedded system for adding audio.  You will have to record your voiceover using a different program, such a Quicktime or Garage Band and then import the audio clip to your Prezi.  Here is a quick Prezi that walks you through that process.

Watch this slideshare for tips on how to make slides pop.  There are also tools such as Haiku Deck that you can use to create your slides before exporting to Powerpoint or Keynote.

Stock Images

Free Images- These two links list several great resources to find free images for your presentations. Make sure to read the terms of use since each site’s terms may vary slightly.

• http://www.digitalimagemagazine.com/featured-article/25-free-stock-photo-sites/
• http://www.digitalimagemagazine.com/blog/featured/18-more-free-stock-photo-sites/

Paid images- iStockphoto is the largest and best solution for paid images. http://www.istockphoto.com

Pricing depends on the size and quality of image you need.  Getty Images, which has a lot of professional photography, recently announced that its photos can be embedded for free in certain material.  http://www.gettyimages.com/embed

Lesson Learned:  To improve the visual quality of your Powerpoint or Keynote slideshow, use as many images as you can and try to reduce the amount of written text on each screen.  Research on learning sciences teaches us that learners have both an auditory and a visual track.  When they see an image, while listening to a presentation, both tracks are fully engaged.  This is best for retention and transfer.  When text is on the screen, learners use their auditory track to read the text.  Therefore, if you speak as they are reading the text, your students have to make a choice of whether to listen to the narration or to read – they can’t do both at the same time.

What type of images do you use? Do you have any experience with keynote or PowerPoint? Please share with us! If you know of any additional resources add them in the comments below.

At LegalED, we are also looking for teams of law professors to curate (think book editor) video content for the site.  If you are interested in curating a collection of videos in your subject area, please let me know!  You can leave a message in the comment section below.

I’ll have more to share on this topic in future posts.  Don’t forget to follow the conversation @LegalEDweb

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Well readers, we have earned a spot in the ABA Journal‘s Blawg 100, the 8th annual list of the best in blogs about lawyers and the law.   If you want to vote for your beloved Best Practices Blog, the e-mail below gives all the details.

“Dear Blawgger,

Congratulations are in order.

Your blawg has earned a spot in the ABA Journal‘s Blawg 100, our 8th annual list of the best in blogs about lawyers and the law.

The full list appears in the December issue of the magazine, which was posted online today.

As we have in the past, we’re inviting our readers to select their favorites from each of the 13 categories represented in our Blawg 100.

Voting begins today and ends at close of business Dec. 19. Winners will be announced in January.

We invite you to:

• Urge your readers to vote for your blog here.

• Add a Blawg 100 badge to your site. You can find them here.

• Announce your selection with a press release. You can find a sample release here.

• Subscribe here to a list of fellow Blawg 100 bloggers on Twitter. (If you can’t find your handle on the list, please contact us.)

So thanks for your hard work this year. We appreciate the high quality of news and analysis your blog provides to our legal community”.

I finally understand the appeal of the expression “VOTE EARLY AND VOTE OFTEN!”

– Mary

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The lack of available legal representation for low income persons is a persistent problem, and not only in the U.S. Cuts to legal services programs have been deep in England and Wales, where access to civil legal aid has fallen by more than half.

In a recent post, a Solicitor Tutor at Northumbria University, Newcastle, lauds U.K. law schools for increasing clinical opportunities for students, but cautions against using them to attempt to fill the increased need for pro bono legal services. Her message is both important and familiar:

But what we mustn’t do is look upon law schools as a replacement for legal aid, or a sticking plaster for a somewhat bruised legal system.

We cannot forget that this is clinical legal education, designed to give law students the opportunity to hone their practical legal skills, to experience what it is like to sit opposite a real person with a real issue and help them solve a problem. They need to understand how the cases and legislation they learn about in the classroom truly affect individuals and organisations – and to reflect meaningfully on their personal strengths and weaknesses.

Thankfully, we may have moved beyond this corrective conversation in the U.S., where the ABA requires 6 credits of experiential education for all students graduating from accredited law schools, starting very soon. The ABA mandate is intended to improve educational outcomes, not to fill the void for legal services. Experiential courses are explicitly required to integrate and develop legal doctrine, skills, and values through faculty-supervised performances and self-assessments (ABA Standard 303(a)(3)). In contrast, pro bono opportunities “need not be structured to accomplish any of the outcomes required by Standard 302” (Interpretation 303-3). While there is often a wonderful overlap between clinical courses/field placements and public service, it is nice to see the distinction between them articulated by the ABA.

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The trend has been fewer applications for law school and smaller graduating classes. Now we see a drop in bar exam performance. The ABA Journal reports that, according to Above the Law, “Nationwide, scores on the Multistate Bar Exam are nearly three points lower than the national mean for the July 2013 exam, the largest year-to-year drop since the start of the test.” Why? The National Conference of Bar Examiners points to “less able” test takers to explain the drop in scores on the Multistate Bar Exam. What does that mean?

Lawyers don’t need multiple choice test-taking skills to be effective in their work, but law graduates must master this form of test-taking to gain a professional license. So law schools, and their curriculum committees, must consider the extent to which they will shoulder the responsibility for preparing students for the bar exam – including improving their ability to succeed on multiple choice tests. Even before this marked decline in scores, many schools had already changed their bar preparation efforts from subtle to overt.

But at a time when law schools are focusing on teaching integrated doctrine, skills, and values, an already ambitious undertaking, is it backtracking to reconsider the multiple choice test – like LSAT prep all over again – instead of progressively developing knowledge and true professional competence? Or is it appropriate to simultaneously develop the skills students need to pass the (often criticized) bar exam?

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Last week Jeffrey Toobin joined the growing chorus decrying the state of legal education in his article in the New Yorker entitled “The Legal One Percent”. One might expect this nationally renowned legal expert, CNN commentator and author of numerous books on legal issues, to write a thoughtful and inspiring piece on the changes facing legal education and the legal market in general. Instead, what Toobin gives us is an intellectually lazy finger-wagging at law schools, boldly asserting that our “system of professional education” is “directly contributing to inequality.”
This inequality, according to Toobin, is related solely to income. He notes that lawyers working “at the top of the pyramid” at white shoe firms like, for example, Cravath, Swaine, and Moore (his example, not mine) are earning “profits per partner in the multimillions.”
Toobin goes on to characterize “recent law school graduates” as those “at the bottom of the pyramid” and cites the Atlantic for the statistic that “­[m]ore than 180 of the 200 US law schools are unable to find jobs for more than 80% of their graduates.”
I have no quibble with Toobin’s data or his freedom to express his opinion about the state of legal education. I do find it ironic that he took the time to write what could have been a thoughtful piece on the subject in such a time of change, and then simply pointed out that law firm partners make more than young lawyers and that new lawyers are finding it hard to land jobs in the softest economy this nation has seen in a generation.
More troubling, though, is his assertion that law schools are “exploiting” their applicants; and his utter failure to address the massive dearth of access to legal assistance faced by this nation’s citizens–not its law graduates–at the “bottom of the pyramid.”
Finally, Toobin, makes the assertion that “[t]he vast middle of the legal academy—at the big state schools, for instance—is doing only a little better than the schools at the bottom.” He seems to be referring to debt load of graduates, but fails to contextualize the assertion at all. And what of the actual justice-serving work that we in Toobin’s so-called vast middle of the legal academy are engaged in? What of the successful petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights by the University of Miami’s human rights clinic faculty and students on a domestic violence case, yielding a globally landmark decision on police practices in domestic violence cases? What of the MacArthur Foundation grant awarded to Professor Sarah Deer of William Mitchell College of Law to continue her legal work empowering tribal nations to protect their citizens from violence?
Perhaps Toobin’s article title includes the term One Percent because he focused on them, rather than the Occupiers.

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Regular readers of Best Practices for Legal Education Blog know about Michele Pistone’s LegalED. LegalED shares short videos of leading law professors discussing various topics. (Subject matter areas include administrative law, constitutional law, copyright, evidence, immigration law, legal ethics, trial advocacy, and more). Videos can be viewed by students outside of class, freeing up class time for hands-on, problem-based learning and assessment.

If you have not already joined LegalED, you can join now by filling out this short form.

An interview with Michele Pistone on flipping the law school classroom is currently featured in Scholastica Blog.

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So you want to be a law professor. If you do a quick Internet search (as I did today), you will likely find the following advice:

• The most important factors in determining your success in the market for a law professor position are: (1) the law school you attended (top 5 is ideal; top 20 is workable; a school ranked below that will make your search difficult); (2) law review membership, (3) federal clerkship or clerkships; (3) having one or more published law review articles after graduation; (4) a couple of years of practice experience; and (5) excellent recommendations from law faculty.
• Adjunct teaching experience is not helpful to your candidacy.
• Generally, practice experience is not helpful to your candidacy.
• If you want to be a clinician, practice experience is likely important and a record of publication is likely less important. In one article, a professor explained that in his time on appointments committees he found that most candidates who had extensive practice experience were more interested in teaching than scholarship. He suggested, “Such people often are better directed toward clinical work than regular tenure-track positions.”

In the new era of legal education, this seems like a faulty framework for law school hiring decisions. Maybe this is a non-issue. After all, with declining applications and enrollments, many law schools are not hiring.

But for schools that are hiring, isn’t it irresponsible to continue hiring based on the old criteria? Today’s law students expect to be prepared for practice. The old model – a single exam at the end of a semester of case law and the Socratic method – does not cut it. It never adequately prepared people for practice. But in the old days (when I went to the law school), we got our experiential learning after graduation.

Today, that hands-on learning needs to start in the law school classroom. Preparing students for practice means providing context. It means putting students in the role of lawyer so that they can begin to understand how lawyers use the law to help solve clients’ problems in practice. It means providing students feedback during the semester.

This can, and should, be part of legal education for all three years of law school. It need not be reserved for clinics and externships. This education is something that all law professors should be able to provide our students.

Who should law schools hire to train the next generation of lawyers? Does it make any sense that people (1) interested in teaching; (2) with practice experience; and/or (3) who did not attend a top law school should be viewed as less qualified for law professor positions? Why is a clinical teaching position not a “regular tenure-track position” at most law schools? Aren’t people with a passion for teaching and/or with significant practice experience just as capable as the “traditional” applicants to produce meaningful scholarship?

Some law schools have followed a different hiring model for many years and others are changing. I am sure there are others that believe there is a work-around. They will continue with business as usual, but lean heavily on clinicians in non-tenure track positions to provide the experiential learning students and employers demand. But maybe it’s time to start thinking about the advantages of a different approach.

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http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2014/09/15/law-students-need-to-hear-about-the-dark-side-of-being-a-lawyer-says-professor/

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The recently passed ABA accreditation standard 302 requires schools to report student learning outcomes. A learning outcome has been defined as something a student can do now that she could not do before [or that she can do better than she did before].

One classic way to measure learning is to give pre-tests. When the class begins, students are tested on  key aspects of learning the professor hopes the students will achieve  during the semester. Pre-test results can be compared to end-of-course results to see if, in fact, students’ learning improved. They also can be used by professors to help identify students’ strengths and weaknesses at the outset and to adjust our teaching accordingly. UNM Dean David Herring’s work on measuring cross-case reasoning is an excellent example of how professors can use pre/post tests to measure learning and improve teaching.  papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2387855

While pre-tests may provide learning outcome information, the more intriguing aspect of pre-tests is that they may, themselves, be a learning tool. A recent NY Times article reports studies indicating that pre-tests actually improve final exam performance. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/magazine/why-flunking-exams-is-actually-a-good-thing.html?emc=eta1

The studies’ authors have multiple theories about why pre-tests improve learning. First, they hypothesize that pre-tests help students identify how they will have to think about and synthesize the material. Students begin the course with that information in hand and it shapes their studying.

Another theory is that we suffer from “fluency illusion” – we believe that we truly grasp the material because we have read and highlighted. A pre-test exposes weaknesses in both knowledge and application.

Additionally, there are biological explanations for why pre-tests improve student learning. The brain works via developing networks of associations. Pre-testing primes the brain to develop associations for the material in the pre-test so that when it is later covered in class, the brain can more easily link the new information to existing information.

In the studies presented in the NY Times article, the pre-tests were particularly helpful with multiple choice test performance, and a key to improved performance was providing students with the correct information shortly after they had taken the pre-tests

The value of pretests may depend upon the type of course and the skills and knowledge tested. Yet the idea has intriguing possibilities. Would a pre-test before we covered hearsay improve student learning of that difficult topic? Would a course pre-test on reading/interpreting statutes result in better student performance of this skill at the end of the semester? Would providing 1Ls with a mock exam and an annotated model answer shortly after they began law school improve overall first year exam performance?

Data from other disciplines suggests pre-testing primes students to learn the material and it provides teachers with data we can use to see if the learning occurred. The value of pre-tests in legal education is an idea that certainly merits further study.

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http://chronicle.com/article/Lets-Ask-More-of-Our/148559/

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In his recent op-ed for the National Law Journal, Ray Brescia discusses the need for upper-level classes in law school that afford students a chance to learn the art of the legal profession, and not just the tools of the trade.  Read: As School Year Begins, Think Outside the Tort.

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