THE ROLE OF CRITICAL THEORY SCHOLARSHIP IN BEST PRACTICES

Posted on May 7, 2009 by Mary A. Lynch

As law schools and law faculty engage in legal education reform, the question arises: What is the role of critical theory or theory-critique?    Some of our friends and colleagues in the critical race, feminist, post-feminist and other theory-critique schools may feel left out of the dialogue/teaching initiatives when,  in fact, such “theory-critique” skills are an important part of effective lawyering.  Continue reading →

Filed under: Best Practices & Setting Goals, Best Practices for Institutional Effectiveness, Best Practices, Diversity & Social Justice, Best Practices, Outcomes & Assessment Techniques, Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | 2 Comments »

AALS Steps Forward on Best Practices, Carnegie and LEARN Recommendations

Posted on May 4, 2009 by Mary A. Lynch

The AALS’s Standing Committee on Curriculum Issues sent an e-mail to law school deans and others last Friday requesting information about “ways in which law teachers are enriching their classroom teaching by bringing in background materials that go beyond the judicial opinion.”  Continue reading →

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Play, Creativity, Improvisation

Posted on April 10, 2009 by dmaranville

Why are  play, improvisation, and creativity showing up in so many different conferences and publications these days?  And what do they have to do with best practices in legal education?

The 2008 AALS Conference in New York included an Open Source presentation on play, and a Clinical Section presentation on improvisation.  The 2008 Clinical Conference in Tucson also included a session on improvisation (I organized that one and can vouch that we sent in our proposal before  learning that the same topic would be addressed in New York).

Master teacher Gerry Hess wrote about asking his students do  creative representations of the conceptual framework for personal jurisdiction years ago  (I stole his idea for a “class participation” option and built on it twice.  By also asking them to integrate the pieces of civil procedure into a creative  “big picture” project.  And by giving an in class group work assignment to draw the “stream of commerce.”)

And,  of course, interest in storytelling is high (perhaps a follow-up to the focus on narrative in the late 80’s and 90’s, including the LawStories series, and the Conferences on Storytelling.

I pondered the “why now” and “best practices?” questions when I saw the Journal of Legal Education scholarly article follow-up to the Open Source play presentation.  http://kotplow.typepad.com/clinicians_with_not_enoug/2009/03/ssrn-.html.

Is the why just aging law professors?   Always-were- creative types who now feel the confidence to be a little more “out there”?   Others starting to develop that side of their brains late in life?   Or another result of the tightening market for Ph.D’s and K-12 teachers in the 70’s that brought people into law who otherwise might have landed elsewhere?

As to “best practices” — presumably active learning necessarily means engaging both hemispheres of the brain.  If we want to “Teach the Whole Class” (to crib the title of an excellent Institute for Law Teaching video), surely we need to teach to learning styles that include the kinesthetic  — maybe manipulating play doh, as one of my married-with-children law students did for her personal jurisdiction conceptual framework?  And good legal work and good teaching require some ability to improvise in response to new situations.

I’m curious how many other such efforts around play and improvisation I’ve missed.  Am I right that these issues are “in the air”?

Filed under: Catalysts For Change, Teaching Methodology, Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | 2 Comments »

If You Build It, They Will Come

Posted on April 9, 2009 by Roy Stuckey

I have long believed that alumni will financially support law school programs that are designed to prepare students for practice. I also believe that such programs will give schools an advantage over peer institutions in recruiting students.
The experience at Washington & Lee supports my theses. After making a commitment to transform its third year into an experiential education format beginning this coming Fall, W&L received a $2 million gift from an alum to help support this initiative. The school also reports that “75 second-year students opted in to become the first class to go through the program. This is well more than half of the rising 3L class and exceeds our expected enrollment by roughly thirty students.”
To top off the good news, the school announced that it has hired experiential education guru (my words) Jim Moliterno, formerly of William and Mary, as W&L’s Vincent Bradford Professor of Law.
We should all wish for the success of the program at W&L and similarly bold moves at other schools. If they can demonstrate the educational superiority of their curriculums others will follow. And it won’t hurt to show strong support from alumni and potential students.

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The Law Teacher

Posted on April 7, 2009 by michaelhunterschwartz

The latest issue of The Law Teacher is out– http://www.washburnlaw.edu/faculty/schwartz-michael-institute/15-2lawteacher(2009).pdf .

Several of the articles address topics near and dear to those of us interested in legal  education reform. In particular, Harriet Katz’s “Personal Assessment” paper offers an exciting tool for building reflection skills that can be adapted to even the most doctrine-and-theory course you teach.

Barb Glesner Fines, the Law Teacher’s First “Guest Columnist” convincingly argues that improving law teaching remains critical even (and perhaps, especially) in tough economic times.

Corrie Lynn Rosen’s “Thoughts on Being New to Academic Support” offers this gem of an image of a law school class, “My classroom would be a forum where students could try on new, difficult, or otherwise missed ideas without fear of embarrassment . . . where students would make understanding their own learning process part of addressing the larger questions . . . ”

Steve Coughlan of Dalhousie Law School in Canada offers a wonderfully-crafted explanation of why he teaches.

We hope you find these and the other articles helpful and inspiring.

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On Change, Hierarchies, and Gravitas

Posted on April 2, 2009 by dmaranville

I’ve been musing on the subject of “gravitas” lately.  Why?

  • The LEARN report that Mary blogged about last month contains the sentence “LEARN has gathered law schools and educators with the experience, imagination and gravitas to effect real improvements in how the future lawyers of the country (and the world) are trained.”
  • I wasn’t able to attend Larry Marshall’s presentation at the UW’s Legal Education at the Crossroads Conference last September.  But I was told he also used the term “gravitas” in his presentation to describe why it was that the Carnegie Foundation’s effort, now called LEARN, disproportionately includes top ranked schools.

Now, I’ve talked to Larry Marshall about this subject.  He’s an amazing and thoughtful guy.  And most of us would probably agree:   if the one, or three, or five schools that produce most of the law teachers in the country radically change their curriculum and teaching methods in the next five years, we’ll see major transformation in other schools in another ten to fifteen years, if not less.  So maybe that’s a sensible strategy.

At the same time, I’m not so comfortable with the “it’s all about the gravitas” approach.  Maybe it’s because many people thought John Kerry had “gravitas” back in 2003.  And lots of folks thought Barack Obama didn’t in 2008.

Maybe because so many of the innovators in teaching methods and curriculum in the last decade have come from schools that lack “hierarchy gravitas”, but felt compelled to help their students learn better.

And maybe it’s because I fear the potential (or reality) of transformative efforts being undermined by fractures along the gravitas axis.  Of the “grav’s” wasting time reinventing wheels long since created and put on the vehicle by the un-grav’s.  Of  the ungravs getting discouraged because the gravs get all the glory for work that was initiated by the ungravs.

Tip o’ the hat to the un-grav’s for doing all the work in the trenches for all these years.  Another tip o’ the hat to the grav’s for moving the transformation checker down the board with the LEARN initiative.  And, please, all you gravs out there, keep working on inclusiveness and giving credit where it’s due.

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So many conferences,so little time

Posted on March 11, 2009 by Robert Dinerstein

The postings from last weekend’s University of Maryland School of Law conference are great for those of us who were unable to attend.  Some of us were at another conference last Thursday and Friday–Yale Law School’s celebration of Continue reading →

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U of M third panel: Best Practices and Professional Purpose and Identity

Posted on March 10, 2009 by Mary A. Lynch

(Continuing Report on U of Maryland’s 3/6 Conference)

The third panel presentation organically and beautifully modeled how to teach and communicate in accord with Best Practices.  (I will post the webcast to the Events tab above as soon as I receive it so you can view the discussion and interaction).

First, CUNY Professor Sue Bryant led an interactive discussion Continue reading →

Filed under: Technology, Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | 1 Comment »

CPS Clickers in the Law School Classroom: A CRIM LAW EXPERIMENT

Posted on March 10, 2009 by Mary A. Lynch

Darlene Cardillo, instructional technologist at Albany Law School, sent me the link to her article entitled, The Use of Clickers in the Law School Classroom, which was recently published in THE LAW TEACHER (pp.13-14). http://blog.engaging-technologies.com/2009/02/cps-clickers-in-law-school-classroom.html
 

Darlene has written an excellent article about Professor Daniel Moriarty’s use of clickers in his 1L Criminal law class and how he incorporated clicker questions into his TWEN (The Westlaw Education Network) website. I found most interesting the results of the online survey she sent students asking them how the use of CPS enhanced their learning of the course material. You can see the responses that she gathered from students on her blog: http://albanylawtech.wordpress.com/2008/05/19/getting-ready-for-cali-conference-presentation/

She and Professor Moriarty presented at the University of Texas School of Law on “Using Clickers in the Law School” at the CALI Conference on June 19, 2008.

Filed under: Best Practices, Outcomes & Assessment Techniques, First Year Law School Innovations, Technology, Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | Comments Off on CPS Clickers in the Law School Classroom: A CRIM LAW EXPERIMENT

CURRICULAR IDEAS FROM HARVARD, NEW MEXICO AND STANFORD

Posted on March 6, 2009 by Mary A. Lynch

CURRICULAR IDEAS FROM HARVARD, NEW MEXICO AND STANFORD 

The second panel of today’s UM conference focused on “Redevelopment of the Law School Curriculum.”  Professors Antoinette Sedillo-Lopez, Todd Rakoff, and Larry Marshall described longstanding or new curricular ideas which meet at least some of the goals of Best Practices enthusiasts. 

Larry Marshall began the session on the positive note that  we’ve reached a moment where   it is no longer the case that  legal educators stand up at conferences and declare that the “best way to teach students” is to have students “repeatedly go to classes” over and over for three years in which they are taught by the Case Dialogue method and be assessed at the end of each course by a one-shot exam.  Yet, he observes,  THAT IS STILL THE  DOMINANT METHOD FOR MANY CLASSES AT MANY SCHOOLS.  That is why he urges all of us to engage in the kind of widespread curricular reform efforts encouraged in the LEARN report ( see my previous post ) which he describes as an exercise in incremental pragmatism.   Continue reading →

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BREAKING NEWS: LEARN Report Sent to all Deans

Posted on March 6, 2009 by Mary A. Lynch

March 5, 2009
 
To:        Law School Deans & Associate Deans

From:      Steering Committee of LEARN (Legal Education Analysis & Reform
Network)

Re:        Outline of the Work that LEARN is Doing in Cooperation with the
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching Continue reading →

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DEANS DISCUSSION of BEST PRACTICES

Posted on March 6, 2009 by Mary A. Lynch

I  type this post while listening to the Deans’ Panel presentation at the University of Maryland’s Conference – Curriculum Reform: Linking Theory and Practice.   Three Law School Deans, reflecting on the evolving reform movement in Legal Education, describe Best Practices  as a win-win for Deans and a force to be embraced and enjoyed.  Continue reading →

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Contribution of Board of Trustees Members to Best Practices Movement

Posted on March 4, 2009 by Mary A. Lynch

Yesterday,  an active and caring member of our school’s Board of Trustees Long Range Planning Committee came to visit me to learn more about Best Practices and the legal education reform movement.  His visit started me thinking about an untapped resource in this reform effort – Board Members. Continue reading →

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Sharing Best Practices in A Tough Economy

Posted on February 20, 2009 by glesnerb

The economic downturn puts legal education at a crossroads indeed. Travel freezes, pay cuts, tuition increases, even furloughs: law schools have clearly not escaped current economic woes. How will the economy affect the drive to improve legal education? As the budget crunch hits law schools, one can expect steps to trim faculty, rely more on adjuncts, and attempt to increase classes to generate more tuition. None of these steps are likely to bode well for the forward progress of legal education reform. Continue reading →

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How to Reward Good Teaching?

Posted on February 11, 2009 by Roy Stuckey

Texas A&M announced that it will pay bonuses of $10,000 for good student evaluations.  Fred Moss of SMU called this a bad idea in an email to the AALS Teaching Methods Section.  He fears a “‘race to the bottom,’ with professors vying with each other to be the easiest, least demanding, spoon-feeders amongst their peers.”

I don’t know whether or not I should share Fred’s concerns.  I assume that Texas A&M considered this possibility before implementing the incentive plan.  It seems to me that a lot will depend on the content of the student evaluation forms. 

Fred’s comments, however, do raise the important question of  how law schools should encourage good teaching.  For too long, law professors have been rewarded primarily on the basis of their scholarship with little more than lip service given to the quality of their teaching.  Consequentially, many law teachers have not strived to be excellent teachers.

I think we all agree that law schools should encourage their faculties to strive to be excellent teachers.  If so, what can law schools do to provide encouragement?  If not through bonuses based on student evaluations, then how?

I look forward to reading your responses.

Roy

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