Best Practices for Legal Education

One of our contributors, Michele Pistone, had the idea to include cross-posting functionality and alerts for updates to the blog publicized through websites like Facebook and Twitter. Be on the lookout for these new additions to our repertoire!

If you wish, you can follow these new accounts at:
https://twitter.com/CELTLawBlog
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Best-Practices-for-Legal-Education/548538071848965

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My Summer Reading List

by Nancy Cook

One of the great things about this blog is the exchange of ideas about changes that might make legal education better and law practice more responsive to client and societal needs. In the wake of Best Practices and the Carnegie Report (not to mention the financial meltdown), we are a people in search of new models, meaningful innovation, creative approaches. In that spirit, I offer some choices for summer reading. This is not a review of books, nor am I advocating in favor of any particular ideas that are presented in the following list of books. I won’t even make connections between the ideas in these books and legal education. I do believe such connections to law, law practice, and law teaching are there, but I leave it to you, Dear Reader, to draw them. My only goal is to pique your curiosity and send you in search of good reads to feed the appetite for best practices.

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.  A tipping point, as the book’s cover defines it, “is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips and spreads like wildfire.” A lot of readers describe the book as an “exploration” of this phenomenon. I’ll just mention a couple ideas that strike me as provocative in the world of lawyers. One is about the significance of context. Here the idea is not so much that context – experience, culture, social environment – affects the way each of us processes and understands events, but that it is the smallest of things in our environment that will trigger contextual associations. So changing small details in the immediate environment can have big impact. Another idea Gladwell plays with is that in order to have a big movement that creates change there have to be, first, a lot of little, autonomous movements.

Imagine by Jonah Lehrer. Lehrer’s book is about how the seemingly serendipitous “aha!” moments of creativity happen. He draws lots of Baby-Boomer readers in with a first chapter about Bob Dylan’s brain (hint: “like a Rolling Stone” was written in “a lonely cabin.”) But I’ll jump to a chapter closer to the end where the author talks about how experts – “people deep inside a domain”—“often suffer from a kind of intellectual handicap.” He argues for an infusion of outsiders to the problem solving realm, whatever that realm is. “Our thoughts are shackled by the familiar.” Use that quote in your next appellate brief.

A Hidden Wholeness by Parker Palmer.  This is a book about community in fractured work lives. A central operating principle that Palmer discusses is the “circle of trust.” He advocates an intentional creation of safe space within a workplace or organization where people are free to be open and honest without fear of consequences. It takes the whole book to describe how such spaces might be created and how conversations might be facilitated, but the basic idea is one of integrity and support. Palmer gives examples of meetings that begin with “low stake” questions about participant’s personal lives or that are broken up to give people time for reflection.  He discusses the importance of ambiance and aesthetics, the uses of silence, the significance of laughter.

Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson. Here’s one idea Johnson examines: in dense networks, “good ideas have a natural propensity to get into circulation.” This is not a “hive mind” concept, but simply the notion that things spread in close quarters. He also looks at why ideas don’t catch on, and one of the concepts he develops is what he calls the “adjacent possible.” This is an argument about timing, how innovations occur at the edges of existing knowledge, and only rarely succeed if too far disconnected from current beliefs and theories. And he validates the notion that sitting around a table, talking shop, is essential to innovation.       

I’m also reading:

100 Diagrams That Changed the World by Scott Christianson

As Long As Trees Last by Hoa Nguyen

Building Stories by Chris Ware

Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton

Creative Conspiracy by Leigh Thompson

inGenius: A Crash Course in Creativity by Tina Seelig

Quiet by Susan Gain

Red Thread Thinking by Debra Kaye   

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Karen Sloan’s NLJ article highlights concerns raised by many in the legal academy that change could adversely impact diversity in the profession.

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To our valued bloggers and readers,

I would quite like to introduce myself. I am Aaron Bates, a rising 2L at Albany Law. Now that Stephanie Giancristofaro-Partyka has graduated and is currently studying for the bar exam (for which we wish her all the luck in the world), I will be taking over her duties with the Center for Excellence in Law Teaching (CELT) Website and the Best Practices Blog.

As always, if you are interested in becoming a blog author or contributing a blog post to the Best Practices Blog (which is housed within CELT), please let Professor Mary Lynch or myself know and we would be happy to assist!

Thank you for your readership and your loyalty!

-M. Aaron Bates
MBates@albanylaw.edu

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I just learned this from Kate Kruse, President of the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA).

Tomorrow, June 11, 2013, the California Task Force on Admissions Regulation Reform will be meeting in San Francisco to consider its Final Report. 

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The following post comes to us from a very special blogger, Shailini Jandial George, who is a Professor at Suffolk University Law School.

You have experienced a scenario like this: your students come to class with laptops, I pads and phones. They text and email during class. They giggle at something on their screens while you’re lecturing. They’re typing too fast to be taking notes on your lecture. You walk around the room and see Facebook or other social media sights on their screens. If you’ve experienced any of this, or just generally wonder about your students’ ability to focus and concentrate when they are used to this kind of constant stimulation, you’re not alone.

Our students grew up on computers, are used to googling the answers to questions, and are not in the habit of reading. Rather, they read in bits and starts, often clicking on hyperlinks before they read one document front to back. They often do at least two things at once. Research shows that this constant multitasking affects the brain and its ability to learn. Learning happens when we pay attention and process information. Multitasking prompts the wrong part of the brain to fire up (the part once used by cavemen to sense danger and flee) as opposed to the front of the brain used for deep focus and concentration. Some ideas as to how we can change this:

1.Teach students how to learn. They think they know, but they likely have never heard the term metacognition (“awareness and knowledge of one’s own cognition”). They should be instructed in the steps of learning and that law school involves the highest levels of learning—levels they may not have approached prior to law school.

2.Instruct students on the perils of multitasking. While they likely think they can do many things at once, that’s not true unless the two things are like reading and chewing gum. They should know that science has proven that we’re actually task “switching”, jumping from task to task, and that we leak a little mental efficiency with each “switch”.

3.Teach students about successful learning methods. Many are used to highlighting and rereading to “learn” material. Cognitive educational theory shows that those are the two least successful study techniques. Study techniques involving self-questioning, self-explanation, intermittent study of topics, and testing are more successful.

4.Teachers should design their courses by first considering the learning objectives and goals and working backwards to ensure they are met.

5.Teachers should use more visual aids and visual exercises so as not to overtax any one learning “channel”. Straight lecture can overburden the verbal channel. Visual aids and exercises engage more of the students’ learning channels and promote higher levels of learning, particularly where those exercises engage students’ higher order thinking skills.

6.Teachers should use more assessments so students can determine early and often whether they are learning the material. These assessments should mimic the type of assessments on which students’ grades will be based.

Have you found that your students are distracted? Do you wonder if class or the work holds their focus? I’d love to hear others’ perspectives!

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Yesterday,  I sat on the stage of the Saratoga Performing Arts Center (SPAC) and for the 24th time fondly watched law students traverse the stage, receive their juris doctoris diploma, and begin their post-law school lives.  I listened to my 24th Commencement Speaker,  National Public Radio’s Nina Totenberg.  She urged law graduates to look to courageous and humble role models including  Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., who pioneered equal access to justice and reminded us that “it is fundamental that justice should be the same, in substance and availability, without regard to economic status.”   Ms. Totenberg and other honored speakers, including the student representative, did not ignore the difficult economy these graduates face.  They just did not let such challenges limit the enjoyment of the spectacularly beautiful day or define the worth of the graduates. There was an infectious air of optimism and hope honoring the hard work done, the dreams shared, and the knowledge, skills and abilities acquired. One of those graduates was this blog’s own Stephanie Gianchristofaro-Partyka who has spent the past year assisting in all things “Best Practices. ”  We cross our fingers along with her as she waits to hear back from criminal defense employers.   Good-bye, thank you, and good-luck to Stephanie from this blog’s contributors and readers!

Once the ceremony ended and the last photos with families were taken, faculty returned to grading! The ABA Weekly Newsletter and the Wall Street Journal Law Blog http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2013/05/10/law-prof-lets-scrap-the-gentlemans-c/ , have both reported on a grading proposal by University of Arkansas at Little Rock Law Professor Joshua Silverstein, namely that  “Law Schools Should Mostly Ditch C Grades.”   http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/law_schools_should_mostly_ditch_c_grades_law_prof_argues

Silverstein notes on his SSRN site that “C marks virtually always denote unsatisfactory work in American graduate education.  Law schools are the primary exception to this convention. It is time we adopted the practice followed by the rest of the academy.” 

Reasons to “ditch” the C’s include:

• inequity – many law schools ranked in the top tier by U.S. News essentially have eliminated the use of C grades, while policies in fourth-tier schools often encourage or require large numbers of Cs
• jobs – grading policies which encourage low grades damage students’ placement prospects
• stress – Cs do psychological injury to law students generally familiar with achieving A’s and B’s

I find Professor Silverstein’s arguments persuasive, but the need to make the arguments saddens me.  Almost seven years ago, Roy Stuckey et. al. urged law schools to stop “sorting” students by a method that is only helpful to prospective employers looking for a simple screening system and instead to provide formative and evaluative assessment of law students and graduates.  This shift would  create a more competent profession and more able learners. Such an assessment structure would eliminate the issues which Silverstein’s C’s raise.  (You either become increasingly competent to practice and engage with the law or you need to re-assess your life goals!)  Despite this reasoned plea, the media and the academy is still stuck in a mindset that focuses on sorting methods and “grade inflation” rather than on better preparation and assessment of law students to serve clients and society.

Thankfully, my final grading this semester includes such assessment methods: clinical performance evaluations, student reflections and hybrid field supervisor evaluation and input.   In end of semester meetings, after 14 weeks of clinical pedagogy, this group of students was able to honestly evaluate strengths, abilities not yet acquired and ways to obtain necessary  skills and abilities either  in the next year of law school (second years) or in the early years of practice/pro-bono/business work (third years).  And I was able to review a series of simulations, real work product, classroom activities and a feedback loop to determine my grades. The students were able to acknowledge the psychologoical and personality issues which obstructed their growth and identify practice situations well-suited or ill-suited for them.   These students have learned to be more reflective, to “own” their education and career formation, and to care deeply about their role in improving justice and the profession. Justice Powell and Nina Totenberg would be proud of them …..and so am I.

What do you think about Silverstein’s arguments and about your effective assessment methods?

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