One of my colleagues from the University of New Mexico, Sergio Pareja is here in Guanajuato teaching International Business Transactions. He wrote the following email to our faculty about laptop use in the classroom. I thought it would be of interest to other classroom teachers, so I asked him if I could share it with this blog. He agreed. Continue reading
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One of the great things about teaching in the Guanajuato Summer Law Institute is the opportunity to meet professors from our partner law schools. At our mid-day comida today, Professor Jorge Ramirez from Texas Tech talked about his approach to providing interim feedback in his International Business and International Law courses. During the semester he gives the students problems that he asks them to work on in groups of two or three. The problems are designed to cover the material fairly comprehensively. Each of the groups is assigned a different problem and they are required to provide a written analysis of the problem to Professor Ramirez. Then, he reviews the students’ written responses to the problems and then MEETS with each small group to give them feedback on their first draft. They are asked to take his feedback and rewrite the answer to the problem. Professor Ramirez then shares the re-writes with the whole class. Professor Ramirez thus provides formative feedback that the students take very seriously since they know that their work will be shared with their colleagues. He has the opportunity to assess the students learning and make adjustments during the semester to ensure that the students grasp the material and can discuss and analyze the problems effectively. What a neat idea!
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The ABA holds an associate deans conference every other year. In the past, as associate dean for clinical affairs, I looked at it, and thought it was not as relevant to my work as the clinical director’s conferences put on by the AALS. So, I had never attended the conference. However, I must say that this conference was marvelous. And, many of the sessions were really applicable to the big picture of running a law school and many issues in which clinical teachers are interested. Continue reading
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The ABA Center for Professional Responsibility held the 34th Annual Conference on Professional Responsibility this past week in Boston Massachusetts. The program included a presentation entitled “Teaching Ethics and Professional Development: Legal Education at a Crossroads.” Professors Judith Wegner, Peter Joy, and I (Barbara Glesner Fines) presented the program which focused on legal education’s role in developing law students’ sense of professional identity and purpose. Professor Wegner summarized the Carnegie Report as it speaks to this issue and Professor Joy gave an overview of the Best Practices project’s discussion. Most of the session was devoted to learning from the approximately 150 judges, attorneys and law professors in attendance. The question “What is professional identity?” Continue reading
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On May 16, the day before they crossed the podium in cap and gown, 13 law students were sworn in as members of the New Hampshire Bar. None of them had taken the traditional bar exam. All of them had participated in an intensive two-year bar preparation course as part of their enrollment in the Daniel Webster Scholar program. In the NH Supreme Court’s special session that day, Justice Linda Dalianis, the leader in creating the program, celebrated this first class’s fulfillment of her vision: making better lawyers. Continue reading
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More synchronicity in the slow but steady march to transform legal education. This email floated across the family law list serve. This is an exciting project!
Dear Colleagues:
We are pleased to announce a new initiative to help us address the integration of family law and family practice in the classroom. In this email, we describe our goals for the project and solicit your input and advice. Continue reading
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As one academic year winds down, plans are already being made for next year’s faculty hiring. What does that have to do with Best Practices? One could argue that to implement the vision of the Carnegie Report and Best Practices law schools should only hire applicants who have practiced law for at least a decade and have become “masters” or “experts” in their field of practice. Such applicants, it follows, can easily integrate the apprenticeships of practice, professional role identity and core knowledge emphasized in both reports.
Although I do believe the legal academy and most faculty recruitment committees currently overemphasize scholarship and undervalue teaching potential, I am not of the opinion that only expert practitioners can teach in accordance with Best Practices and Carnegie. Just as the young faculty member who was hired to fill the “Property” slot may eventually become the Administrative Law expert, so too the “faculty member theorist” with no practice experience can become an ally of Best Practices. Faculty members who care about their students and what goes on in their classroom are always learning new ways to equip themselves for better teaching. Theorists can interact with the practice world, co-teach with a practioner or clinician, bring expert practioners into the classroom and/or consult with practioners.
In terms of Best Practices in faculty hiring, it seems critical to ensure that prospective candidates are evaluated not just upon their potential for scholarly contribution, or ability to lecture, but on how much they VALUE the lessons which practicioners and the profession can offer students. In addition, candidates should demonstrate an interest in innovative and experiential teaching pedagogy, in integrating the 3 apprenticeships of Carnegie and in the honest assessment of what students have learned as outlined in Best Practices.
Fortunately for me, the recruitment committee at Albany Law School agrees. This year, during our hiring season, we intend to evaluate candidates, among other criteria, upon their demonstrated or potential ability to integrate the 3 apprenticeships of Carnegie and/or teach in accordance with Best Practices. I would be interested in knowing how other law schools plan on addressing Best Practices in faculty hiring.
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As part of the joint project with the UNM medical school that I described in earlier blogs, we used standardized clients in my Family Law course the same way standardized patients were used at the Medical School, as a potential tool of assessment. I am now thinking about using them again next year in my Family Law class and now with one semester experience under my belt, I am thinking about the potential of using them more effectively as part of the training. I saw that student interest and engagement in the topic was definitely improved because of their need to prepare for and conduct an initial interview with an actor. And, the actors filled out their evaluation of the student’s performance, so the students received feedback. I am wondering whether it might be more effective for the actors to discuss the interview with the student out of role. That is, the actor would go over the evaluation sheet and give an honest appraisal about the student’s strengths and weaknesses in the interview and also answer the student’s questions. I think such a direct communication would help the students develop more self awareness and also be a very effective formative tool to help students improve their skills. Of course, this would require that the actors be trained in effective interview techniques. I found that it was simply not practical for me to go over them with the students one by one. Too many students, not enough time! Another thought is to have the student’s go over the interviews with each other.—perhaps in pairs. Of course, this would be after training too! As I prepare to use standardized clients again this fall, I welcome your ideas about this. It would also be great to hear from others who are using standardized clients. If you don’t want to blog about this, please email me lopez@law.unm.edu with your ideas and suggestions. Thanks!
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As I was frantically trying to clear out my emails to stay under my disk quota, I ran across an email sent to the faculty by Barbara Blumenfeld, our Legal Research and Writing Director. I had saved it because I liked it. I thought it could use a broader audience so I asked her if I could post it. She graciously gave her permission. Here it is:
This past summer the Legal Writing Director’s conference focused on “Best Practices in Teaching, Management, and Scholarship.” We had several speakers and workshops on both the Best Practices and Educating Lawyers books. This reflects the fact that legal writing has been concerned with and teaching using many of what are the “best practices” for twenty years or more.
One of our plenary speakers was Judith Wegner, one of the authors of Educating Lawyers. Some of her comments reflect what you already know if you have explored the legal writing literature or talked with legal writing professionals: that legal writing is not an English class but is about reasoning and argumentation and that its pedagogy can lend insight to legal education generally. That is, it teaches legal communication and problem solving. Professor Wegner noted many of the special virtues of legal writing pedagogy, including:
* Bringing together content knowledge and practical skills in close interaction
* Allowing “time out” to observe/analyze thinking
* Fostering of the development of metacognition
* Tacit structure that models professional practice and self-awareness
* Integration of “practice” and professional identity with theory/cognition
Since lawyers are generally communicating a legal proof to a variety of audiences, legal writing must teach the skills necessary to develop that proof as well as to communicate it. Those skills are many of the skills noted as essential to training lawyers. Legal writing professionals have been studying learning theory and applying it to this teaching task for many years. Your UNM legal writing faculty would be delighted to discuss these thoughts and legal writing pedagogy with you more, either individually or perhaps as a panel at a dean’s hour or something similar.
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As we have been working on curricular planning, one of my colleagues, Laura Gomez could not attend an early meeting (I think she was at a book signing or her son’s field trip or something). With her permission, I am posting her thoughts:
Initially I’d like to thank Suellyn for turning our attention to the Carnegie report and to the Best Practices for Legal Education report. Together, the books point to deeply entrenched problems with how law schools teach and prepare students for the legal profession; they also suggest strategies for improvement. I share Suellyn’s assessment that we at the Universityof New Mexico are poised to take advantage of the cumulative wisdom presented in these studies. We are well-suited to do so for three reasons: (1) we are a highly collegial group (those of us who have come from other institutions might see this more clearly, but I think we all know it at the gut level); (2) we have a tradition of valuing teaching and truly caring about students; and (3) we have an enviable student-faculty ratio.
Reading these two books helped… Continue reading
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As I said in my last post, the Best Practices book suggests that a law school’s curriculum should “achieve congruence in its program of instruction”. Congruence requires that law schools harmonize educational programs with mission; curriculum with educational outcomes, and instructional objectives with curriculum (p.93). My last post focused on mission, this one will focus a bit on educational outcomes. At first blush, this can seem a bit intimidating, after all, the range of skills that a lawyer should have can be daunting. However, we do have some guidance in the MacCrate report published by the American Bar Association in 1992, the plethora of literature that as written before that report came out (and the many pieces that have been written since ) our own experiences, and our knowledge about the communities our graduates will serve. Continue reading
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The University of Denver, Sturm College of Law is using some of the sessions in its faculty lunch series to think about and talk about the Carnegie Report and Best Practices. I spoke at a faculty lunch on March 13 about Best Practices. I asked the organizer, Laura Rovner, in advance of the presentation about whether I should assume that faculty members were familiar with the book. She said no, it would be handed out after my presentation. I decided to focus on curricular development, assessment and professionalism. So I discussed the basic principles about developing a coherent curriculum, the basic need for students to receive formative and interim assessment based on clear articulation of learning goals and I posed the question about what professionalism education might look like at their law school.
I quickly realized that Continue reading
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Washington and Lee University School of Law is dramatically changing its curriculum by creating a new third year curriculum devoted to professional development through simulated and real-client practice experiential learning. Influenced by the Carnegie Report, Educating Lawyers, and Best Practices for Legal Education, the new third year curriculum integrates legal theory, doctrine and the development of professional, ethical judgment necessary to the development of professional identity. This is one of the most comprehensive reforms in legal education undertaken by any law school. Continue reading
Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Best Practices & Externships, Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | 1 Comment »
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Best Practices for Legal Education 