Best Practices for Legal Education

Lesson 2:  Passion, Context and Legal Education

In recent years it’s become commonplace to talk about the importance of encouraging our students to find and pursue their passion.  The Jens’ Three Degrees Project is an amazing example of what passion, accompanied by vision, collaboration, smarts and hard work, can produce.  So it was sobering to hear about the negative effect of the 1L year on a Jen’s belief that law school could help her pursue climate justice.

After the Jens’ presentation, I had a lovely conversation with Jeni Barcelos. Our focus turned to legal education.  Jeni shared that after her first year in law school she was saying “I’m not sure I can do this.”  The de-contextualized appellate focus of the 1L year had communicated such a monolithic message that being a lawyer means being a litigator that she was demoralized about the value of law school for pursuing her passion, climate justice.  Jeni was fortunate to have already reached out to Prof. Bill Rogers, environmental law scholar par excellence, at our law school.  And, fortunately for all of us, he convinced her otherwise.

Lest you think that Jeni’s post-1L understanding of what it means to be a lawyer was unique, just this quarter I encountered two students with similar stories.  On the first day of class in my Unemployment Compensation Clinic and in my Access to Justice course, my students said a few words about their backgrounds and goals.  In each class one student said something like “I’m not planning to be a lawyer, I want to do policy work.”

In case you’re wondering, no, I don’t think that my law school is unusually court-centric.  (Although it has occurred to me that our recent very successful efforts to promote judicial clerkships to students may have unintentionally and unexpectedly reinforced the litigation-oriented view of lawyering.)

Jeni’s prescription for how law schools can avoid this “beat the passion out of them” phenomenon:  situate those appellate cases in context and provide opportunities to talk about the larger issues, including non-litigation strategies.

So I come back to two themes that have long held my attention and that are incorporated into the Best Practices methodology:  passion and context.  See BP, p. 141 (context) and BP, pp. 113-114, 121-122 (factors affecting passion).

Yes, we need to teach the traditional skills of analysis that underlie the first year.  Yes, students need to learn a considerable amount of information & doctrine in order to exercise those skills.  And, we need to find new ways of achieving those goals more efficiently, so we can support our students’ passions by providing the context they need in order to care about that information.

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Maybe watching TV after school was not so bad after all.  The days of students procrastinating by watching TV appear to have been less damaging than the distractions of technology today, and it could impact how we teach.  With the development of smartphones and the Internet, students have more interaction with technology than ever before, and in many different mediums.  Specifically, YouTube, Facebook, video games, music and anything else they can get their hands on.

In a New York Times article entitled “Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction” scientists have found that the stimulation received from instant feedback and multitasking can have a profound impact on developing brains.  In a study comparing the impact of television and video games on sleep and memory of vocabulary, researchers found “that playing video games led to markedly lower sleep quality than watching TV, and also led to a ‘significant decline’ in the [subject’s] ability to remember vocabulary words.”  One researcher speculated that the impact may be due to “the intensity of the game experience over[riding] the brain’s recording of the vocabulary.” “‘When you look at vocabulary and look at huge stimulus after that, your brain has to decide which information to store,’ he said. ‘Your brain might favor the emotionally stimulating information over the vocabulary.’”  The impact on learning can be detrimental because “If you’ve grown up processing multiple media, that’s exactly the mode you’re going to fall into when put in that environment — you develop a need for that stimulation.”

The issue now becomes whether technology should be embraced as part of the solution.  Many teachers loathe the idea of bringing more technology in as they have already seen a regression in high school reading abilities, attributed to the student’s short attention span. For example, students now read aloud in class because the teachers cannot trust that they have the attention span to read at home. In the world of law school, built on casebooks and self-discipline, one must be concerned about how these distracted students will impact the status quo of law school.  Perhaps even the top schools will have to embrace the technological future as we saw at Harvard. Or, just as likely, the top students will always overcome the distractions to gain admittance to top tier institutions.  It may be the middle of the law school pack that has to innovate in order to attract students.

This blog has noted different ways technology has been implement in the law school classroom.  One was the use of email in e-discover, while another focused on the use of TWEN’s features to keep students engaged.  It could be that these will be the norm soon enough.

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An article in the latest issue of Academe discusses a rising trend in corporate and governmental interference with law school clinics.  The article, “Kneecapping” Academic Freedom by Robert R. Kuehn and Peter A. Joy, explores the ramifications of this trend which saw two lawsuits brought this year against clinics for their work. In Maryland, “a law-clinic lawsuit against a $4 billion poultry company triggered a legislative effort to withhold state funds from the University of Maryland unless its law school provided the legislature with sensitive information about clinic clients and case activities.”  Meanwhile, Tulane University “refused to drop an academic program that sometimes represents citizens challenging petrochemical-industry environmental permits”.  In response, “the industry developed an eleven-point plan, in the words of its spokesperson, to ‘kneecap’ the university financially.”

Law clinics have become an essential teaching tool to bring real world legal training into the classroom and help to develop better attorneys. But these attacks are nothing new.  Seemingly, as law clinics developed, so too did the attacks which date back to the 1960’s.  Only this year, however, did these attacks reach the level of severity.

The authors explain that this issue is about academic freedom.  Indeed, it is the clinic’s right to choose the issues they will address and people whom it will represent in the course of teaching law students.

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From: Ruth Ann Robbins, Clinical Professor of Law, Rutgers School of Law-Camden

In early December, 2010, the Legal Writing Institute (LWI) will hold the second annual one-day workshops. In an effort to make these accessible, we are offering them at 16 locations nationwide. We began this program last year, to great success. The workshops are taught by experienced legal writing professors, librarians and writing specialists. The sessions are designed for anyone in academe, new or seasoned, looking for practical ideas and insights on handling some of the more challenging aspects of legal writing and legal writing-infused courses. Presenters will offer tips and best practices for creating appropriate assignments, grading papers and holding student conferences. They will also discuss recent developments in teaching legal research and professional development.

Date
Friday, December 3, 2010 (except where otherwise noted below)

Time
9 a.m. – 6 p.m.

Locations
American University Washington College of Law, Washington, D.C.
California Western School of Law, San Diego, CA
Charleston School of Law, Charleston, SC (Friday, December 10, 2010)
Emory University School of Law, Atlanta, GA
Pepperdine University School of Law, Malibu, CA
Santa Clara University School of Law, Santa Clara, CA
Seattle University School of Law, Seattle, WA
St. John’s School of Law, New York, NY (Manhattan campus)
Stetson University College of Law, Tampa, FL
Suffolk Law School, Boston, MA
The John Marshall Law School, Chicago, IL
University of Dayton School of Law, Dayton, OH
University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TN (Saturday, December 4, 2010)
University of Tulsa College of Law, Tulsa, OK
Wake Forest University School of Law, Winston-Salem, NC
Widener University School of Law, Wilmington, DL

Fee and explanation
$100.  Registration fees will be donated to LWI, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving legal writing by providing a forum for discussion and scholarship about legal writing, analysis and research. LWI promotes the dialogue through its three publications, its annual scholarship workshops, its many committee initiatives, its scholarship grant programs, its specialty conferences such as this summer’s Applied Legal Storytelling Conference (July 8-10 in Denver and co-sponsored by CLEA), and our large national biennial conferences held in even-numbered years (the next one will be in Palm Desert, CA from May 29 – June 1, 2012).

A small number of need-based scholarships will be available at each location.  Contact Prof. Tracy McGaugh to apply for a scholarship. tmcgaugh@tourolaw.edu
Registration
Please register online at  http://www.lwionline.org/lwi_conferences.html

and click on the location where you want to attend.

For more information about the one-day workshops, visit this page:  http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/legalwriting/2010/10/lwi-one-day-workshops.html

More Information
Contact information for LWI’s national co-chairs is: 
Professor Mark Wojcik (The John Marshall Law School) at 7wojcik@jmls.edu
Professor Robin Boyle (St. John’s University School of Law) at boyler@tjohns.edu
Professor Tracy McGaugh (Touro Law Center) at tmcgaugh@tourolaw.edu.

The Legal Writing Institute has over 2,600 members and includes representatives from 38 different countries. It is the second largest organization of law professors in the United States (after AALS). LWI sponsors many different working committees and projects.

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The Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) submitted a letter today to the ABA expressing concerns about the process used by the Standards Review Committee in its comprehensive review of Accreditation Standards.  The Committee submitted a draft late last night (3 days before its next meeting) that would delete Standards 405(c) and 302(b)(4).  SALT submitted a letter raising similar concerns.

You can view the CLEA letter here. 

Thanks. 

Bob Kuehn, President, CLEA

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The faculty at the University of Massachusetts School of Law – Dartmouth started reviewing the Stuckey (and others) Best Practices for Legal Education a couple of years ago, but have become a bit more serious about it in recent months.  Last fall, Mary Lynch and Carrie Kaas presented and lead a short workshop at the School, not just introducing the principles of Best Practices (and the Carnegie Report), but encouraging us to continue our discussions after they left with a view to instilling Best Practices principles into our particular curriculum.  We obediently divided ourselves into sub-groups based on the areas of the curriculum in which we wanted to focus — the First Year, the Upper Level, or the Curriculum as a whole.  The group I chose met only once, and I think was similar to the others, given the distraction of the transformation of Southern New England into the new UMass Law School. An added distraction developed when we all realized that the curriculum with which we had been working was going to have to be revised to reflect our more public-spirited mission, among other factors.  So in the Spring we agreed that, when we next met about Best Practices, we would focus on the last chapter of the book, the one that offers a Model Curriculum.  Finally, we recently attempted this revitalization, and had a free-flowing conversation; the full-time faculty was joined by several other professors from among the legal skills, bar preparation, and academic success departments.

A suggestion made during the conversation seemed to resonate with several participants:  we should develop a list of skill-sets we think all law students should have gained by the time they complete law school.  In order to follow-up on that, since then, a small group (unfortunately, and a possible issue for a future blog posts, the group was exceedingly small and was not representative of the meeting’s participant-groups) of volunteers has met, enjoyed a likely brainstorming session, and developed a tentative list of the skill-sets. 

Where are we now?  We’ve distributed this list to the entire faculty, have asked for input — additions, deletions, etc. — and have invited them all to our meeting this month, during which we hope to match courses with the skill-sets we’ve come up with.

Stay tuned for reports on our progress, and on discussions of participation, buy-in, buy-out, and other controversial items.  Please email me at ischarf@umassd.edu if you’d like a copy of the product once it’s finalized.

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By: Paula Schaefer, Associate Professor, University of Tennessee College of Law

As I planned to teach pre-trial litigation for the first time in 2009, I wanted my case to include electronic-discovery (e-discovery). My research quickly revealed that the pre-packaged pre-trial litigation cases involved car accidents and simple contract disputes. No ESI (electronically stored information) was included, so it would be impossible to conduct e-discovery in these cases. Undeterred, I mused that I could make my own course materials from the contents of my overflowing email inbox.

From that idea, I developed a plan for a two-semester simulation. I offered a group of law students course credit (as an independent study) to email one another, following a loose script, to create a business dispute among their assigned characters. Their dispute would become the lawsuit in my pre-trial litigation class the following semester. In that course, the independent study students would play the clients and the witnesses, and the pre-trial litigation students would be their lawyers. 

The result was not just ESI, but also a realistic case that benefited both groups of students. The article about my experience is tentatively titled Legal Dispute Simulation Meets Pre-Trial Litigation Simulation: An Integrated Approach to Teaching E-Discovery Doctrine, Practice Skills, and Professionalism, available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1676976.

Wait? You’re Giving Law Students Credit for Writing Email?

This is often the first question about the simulation. To receive course credit (one hour total credit for two semesters of work), students do much more than write email. They develop knowledge and skills they will use as lawyers. In the fall semester they negotiate agreements, draft contracts, and communicate (extensively) in writing in email, blogs, and more. In the spring semester, they participate in litigation as clients and witnesses where they have the opportunity to observe various lawyering styles and gain empathy for the clients and witnesses they will encounter in practice. Further, they learn something about the substantive law of the underlying dispute and gain knowledge about e-discovery.  

Doctrine, Skills, and Professionalism in Context

As they might in a doctrinal course (like civil procedure) addressing e-discovery, my pre-trial litigation students read and discuss e-discovery authorities on preservation, cooperation in e-discovery planning, document review and production, and discovery disputes. By adding the simulation to the mix, the pre-trial litigation students are given the opportunity to develop skills in all of these areas of e-discovery practice. In the course of a semester, they advise their clients on preservation issues, plan for e-discovery with their opponents in a 26(f) conference, and use technology to review thousands of electronic documents. They go on to produce responsive documents in an electronic format and prepare privilege logs. And when the production is complete, they negotiate with their opponents to work out lingering discovery disputes.  

At each step of the litigation, they encounter various professionalism challenges. With parties to the litigation walking the halls of the law school, they gain an understanding of their professional conduct obligation to not talk to a represented party. When they experience the temptation to withhold bad documents from their opponents, we discuss the consequences of such misconduct. They face and address the challenge of cooperation (with opposing counsel) that is so essential to e-discovery practice. It is one thing to talk about these issues, but it is another to experience them in the context of a realistic case.  

Can this Work Outside of E-Discovery?

Though I developed my simulation with e-discovery in mind, it could work in many doctrinal and skills classes. The simulation creates a complex business dispute with numerous claims, making it the perfect go-to example in a business torts class. The evidentiary issues generated could be the subject of an evidence class. The simulation characters could also make an appearance in skills classes like negotiation, contract drafting, trial practice, and transactional lawyering (like the University of Tennessee’s capstone Representing Enterprises). I have plans to invite another professor’s mediation students to my pre-trial litigation class next semester to see if they can mediate a resolution to the case prior to trial.  

My loose script for simulation characters (a link is provided in my article on SSRN) could be used by law students anywhere to create a new legal dispute. Or a professor could easily create a new script involving issues he or she is interested in exploring in a doctrinal or skills class. From my experience, I believe such simulations are worth the effort. These simulations can transform an ordinary class into something more realistic. And with that realism comes an opportunity for law students to make the transition to lawyers.

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“We are all programmed to think in story structure. So it makes sense that many great professors infuse their teaching with stories and that we emphasize story structure for centering the representation on the client’s needs and goals. That’s the theory behind the Applied Legal Storytelling conferences. The third conference will take place this summer, July 8-10 at Sturm College of Law, University of Denver. The conference is sponsored by CLEA and the Legal Writing Institute (LWI). The Call for Proposals can be found on the LWI website, www.lwionline.org.  The website also includes a bibliography from the first two conferences. The deadline to submit a proposal is December 7, 2010. “

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By: Jason Huber, Assistant Professor of Law Charlotte School of Law jhuber@charlottelaw.edu

We are all familiar with how practical and pedagogical issues limit the ability of law schools to provide students with traditional clinical opportunities.  In order to expand experiential offerings to students outside of the clinic setting, Charlotte School of Law utilizes capstone classes.   While capstone classes come in variety of forms, we use a course model which blends doctrinal study with practical application.  Recently, our students achieved substantial milestones through one of CSL’s capstone offerings.

In the fall of 2009, I was charged with developing a civil rights clinic.  Working with Professor Adcock, CSL’s Director of Experiential Learning, we saw an opportunity to kill two experiential learning birds with one stone.  Rather than a faculty member designing and implementing a clinic program, we created a Civil Rights Capstone course where students were responsible for researching and developing the civil rights clinic themselves.  The class required students to assume a mock attorney-client relationship with CSL.  They were assigned the task of assisting CSL in creating a civil rights clinic which would provide both a rigorous educational experience and much needed service to the community.  Throughout the class, the students studied the history of the clinical legal education movement, substantive civil rights law, the availability (or lack thereof) of potential remedies, different pedagogical clinical theories and also surveyed many clinicians concerning the nuts and bolts of their programs. 

While doing so, the students discovered a significant hindrance to their client’s goal–the United States District Court for Western District of North Carolina did not have a student practice rule.  After researching various state and federal student practice rules, the students drafted and submitted a proposed rule to the district court.  Chief Judge Robert Conrad and the Board of Judges for the Western District directed Magistrate Judge David Cayer and the Clerk of Court Frank Johns to work with us on creating a rule.  Based on the student drafted rule, after some discussion and editing, the Western District adopted its first ever student practice rule on June 24, 2010. 

We have already seen the fruits of our labor.  On July 1, 2010, CSL student Candace Davis became the Western District’s first certified student practitioner where, under the supervision of Claire Rauscher, Executive Director of the Federal Defenders of Western North Carolina, she represented clients in multiple arraignments, bond and probable cause hearings.

In addition to their successful rule making, the capstone students’ end of the semester presentation to the CSL administration concerning their clinic proposal was very well received and served as the blueprint for our existing Civil Rights Clinic. John Arco, Kevin Beck, Tanea Hines, Jeffrey Ellingsworth, Kevin Vidunas, Hector Henry and Brian Chapman were the students responsible for these successes.

While capstone classes are no substitute for actual clinical offerings, they can provide students with “real world” learning opportunities that build substantive knowledge and problem-solving skills while serving others.   As such, the capstone experience is an important arrow in our experiential learning quiver.

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Even as something like 200 clinical educators were preparing to descend on New York last weekend to engage in an exchange and discussion of scholarship (at New York Law School for the 25^th Anniversary of the Clinical Theory Workshop and at NYU for the third Clinical Law Review Workshop), an article in the South Carolina Law Review raising some questions about (among other things) the value of legal scholarship was making the rounds on listservs and blogs. This confluence of events leads me to want to reflect on AntiDisEstablishmentScholarshipism.

I can’t fully explain to you what AntiDisEstablishmentScholarshipism means, but I will try to deconstruct  it for you here, with minimal footnotes. Let’s start simply with one of its roots, AntiScholarship. I get this.  I think I am a good person to talk about AntiScholarshipism because I was once a true believer and because I still very much appreciate why not everyone wants to spend time writing and reading law review articles. I take pride in the fact that my first publication in a law review was a short story, unadorned by footnotes.  And as I confessed for the first time in New York this past weekend, my first “substantial” article was written on a dare to myself to produce something with 400 footnotes.  Not surprisingly, I suppose, I was taken half-seriously.

But the fact is, I did move over to AntiDisScholarshipism a long time ago.  What I mean by this is that I came to understand the University model of teaching and to value research and writing.  I came to see value in writing to communicate what we know, what we are learning to know.  I believe that thinking theory, thinking abstractly, can make us better teachers, better lawyers, even better people.   I believe this work hones our skills, improves our brains, and maybe staves off Alzheimer’s.  Maybe more importantly, as Claudia Angelos reminded a roomful of clinical folks at lunch a few days ago, we can all point to publications that have affected us and given us something – that have transformed our teaching, helped us understand the systems we operate in, named our struggles, articulated the reasons for what we intuitively believe. So I don’t dis scholarship so much anymore, which I think makes me an AntiDisScholarshipist.

Still, I remain skeptical about the scholarship enterprise as a whole.  We all know the reasons why.  The tenure system, rooted in publications for student-edited journals, contributes to the reproduction of hierarchy (fn: Duncan Kennedy) that many of us generally abhor. Law review articles too often are conversations with ourselves, exclusionary, formulaic and ungrounded in reality (fn Richard Delgado & Jean Stefancic, others).  Therefore, I could easily revert to my AntiScholarshipism past, if I weren’t hell-bent on problem solving; the problem is, I want to grab the benefits I see in Scholarshipism, without falling prey to its practices of inequality and irrelevance. And so I seek a way to claim scholarship by redefining it.

Here’s where I begin: About 20 years ago, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching published a report: Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate by Ernest L. Boyer. (fn needed).  Boyer proposed a broader definition for scholarship than was traditionally assigned to the term in the university system, and laid out a four-dimensional paradigm that includes the following types of scholarship:

1. Discovery (the norm for legal scholarship);
2. Integration  (often cross-disciplinary; contextualizes specialized knowledge; by illuminating connections, creates an extension of practice);
3. Application (a theory/practice bridge; translational, as between professional community and the academy; demonstrates consequences in realistic, practical terms); and
4. Teaching (focus on creation of new knowledge in the presence of learners).

At about the same time, then-Harvard president Derek Bok published an appraisal of the academy, Universities and the Future of America (another fn needed). Both works received a lot of attention in higher education circles. Subsequently, with the support of Carnegie Foundation president (and pedagogy expert) Lee Shulman, a second report was written and published by the Carnegie Foundation.  The second publication, Scholarship Assessed, was developed from a survey of journal editors, scholarly press publishers and funding agencies. The authors came to the conclusion that scholarship across all disciplines seeks conformance with six basic standards: clear goals; adequate preparation; appropriate methods; significant results; effective communication; and reflective critique. Scholarship Reconsidered basically began with the premise that academic scholarship demands excellence in the disciplined and reflective discovery, transmission, and application of knowledge.  Scholarship Assessed provided the scaffolding for evaluating scholarship, regardless of its type.

Clinical scholars are more likely to engage in Types 2, 3 and 4 of the scholarship paradigm set out by Boyer. Among the signature characteristics of clinical scholarship I see are:

• Broadened context, including a focus on trial (as opposed to appellate) courts, the law office, client lives, and community settings;
• Incorporation of interdisciplinary work, applicable to law practice, including, for example, linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and critical theory;
• Dialogic dynamics, or what Clark Cunningham describes as “the subject matter of our scholarship talk[ing] back to us.”  (fn to Clark). Clark’s point, as I understand it, is that as clinical scholars write and reflect on clients, students, courts, systems, and lawyers, they are simultaneously engaged in the practice of law.  This creates a unique structure for both giving voice and learning in action.

I am well aware of the political realities that make it difficult for clinicians to get tenure or even keep their jobs without bowing to the pressures of scholarship as usual; and I admire the pragmatists who, preferring to review student briefs or perfect policy arguments for a legislative agenda, nevertheless buckle down and get those 400-footnoted, doctrinal pieces out on Express-O.  But if we are talking Best Practices here (and we are), I wonder if we might start articulating our own standards of excellence. What would they look like? I can imagine a world in which scholarship is valued because it, say, does no harm; is of use to practitioners; challenges assumptions; broadens horizons (by virtue of being descriptive); transcends the lawyer/client dichotomy; or is simply beautiful. In a world like that, I just might be persuaded to subscribe to a belief in Establishment scholarship, and become an official AntiDisEstablishmentScholarshipist.

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It is well-documented that many students suffer psychological injury caused by some traditional practices of legal educators in the United States. When I was working on the Best Practices book, I learned that Gerry Hess and others believed that the heavy workload on students was one of the stress factors that contributed to harm. This struck a chord with me, because I temporarily lost my ability to read during the second semester of law school due to eye stress. In my second year, I actually had one professor who typically assigned 50 pages of casebook material per class hour. I hated his course because of that.
Until I recognized that excessive reading assignments might be harming my students, I assigned up to 30 pages of reading per class hour. After considering the negative impacts of too much reading, I changed my policy and assigned no more than 20 pages of reading per class hour and sometimes much less than that. Accomplishing this goal forced me to make some painful decisions about what to leave out, but I did it.
The result? My students appreciated what I did, and they were better prepared for class. I do not think the quality of our class discussions diminished at all, which surprised me.

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Have you noticed an improvement in student evaluations of your teaching after implementing recommendations from the Best Practices book? I did.
I generally received high marks from students, but they became even higher once I began embracing more principles of best practices. I think what helped more than anything was that I began to truly embrace the concept of student-centered teaching. For example, I began making time to learn things about my students’ lives outside of the law building. This had two impacts. First, students viewed me as being more concerned about them as people, not just as students. Second, I became more tolerant of some student behaviors, including the student who sometimes fell asleep during my 9 AM Monday class. I knew she was a divorced mother of a high school student who was working her way through law school as a nurse. She worked the Sunday night shift. When she fell asleep, the other students and I let her rest.

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In May, I participated in the Bricks, Bytes and Continuous Renovation conference in Philadelphia, where law school classroom design was discussed (as well as law school building design in general).  The article below, which originally appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, raises some interesting thoughts along those lines.  I doubt there are many law school deans ready to embrace the idea proposed in the article.  But as law schools build for the future (literally as well as figuratively) we need to give more thought to the spatial implications of implementing best teaching practices.  I imagine (hope?) most schools do seek the input of clinicians when planning a new facility.  But what about spaces other than the clinic itself?  Are schools locking themselves into less-than-optimal classroom designs, by just trying to build a spiffier, better-lit version of the traditional classroom?  Or are law schools thinking seriously about the kinds of teaching and other spaces needed in the 21^st century?  To give one example – a common objection to doing break-out groups is that they can’t work in large classes.  And the traditional large, tiered classroom is perceived to be a further impediment.  Those of us who have tried it know that neither the number of students nor the size or layout off the classroom prevents the use of this technique.  But wouldn’t it be even better if best practices were taken into account during the design process for any new or renovated law school building?  Another example would be whether/how law schools are designing spaces to encourage collaboration.  I’m sure other professors know of many other examples; those teachers need to be heard when new or renovated law school space is being designed. 

Wall-E: Reconfigurable Walls at Stanford d.school Make Each Class the Perfect Size
BY Linda Tischler
Wed Apr 28, 2010

Chronicle of Higher Education

Can classroom design influence the quality of learning? Anybody who’s sat in the back row of a big lecture hall with empty seats up front can tell you it’s a perfect setup for disengagement–or for updating your Facebook page.

It’s a problem central to space design at the new Stanford d.school building, and one that planners solved with a massively reconfigurable wall system that lets instructors create the perfectly sized space for each class.

The school’s second floor is, essentially, one large room, framed by a truss system that lets planners design a series of sliders, attached with a gizmo they call a “taco” to a beam-mounted C-channel. That allows teams to create instant studios, of the exact dimensions appropriate to the day’s activities. Need a cozy nook? Done! A wide-open expanse of space? Not a problem.

Additional support is provided by spring-loaded posts, which let classes put wall studs wherever they want.

“The system allows a modal shift between intimate and open,” says Scott Witthoff, co-director with Scott Doorley of the school’s Environments Collaborative, which designed the arrangement along with Dave Shipmen of Steelcase.

Check out the taco itself: it’s subtly branded with an abstracted “d” cutout as an extra, usable hole. That’s also part of the d.school ethos, to expose how things are put together. That ranges from a support wall that exposes the masonry, brick, and stucco of the building’s previous lives to the edges on the tables that show their composition.

The dschool’s DNA is, after all, engineering, so the feeling that it’s all like something out of David Macauley’s “The Way Things Work” is no accident.

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