Student Engagement in Lectures

Posted on April 3, 2016 by Jill Engle

For the past 8 years or so, I have taught Family Law to second- and third-year law students in a lecture course.  For several years, I taught the course both Fall and Spring semesters while operating my clinic simultaneously. Next year, thanks to a brilliant colleague who also teaches Family Law, and my new role directing our externship program, I will not teach the Family Law lecture course.  Uncertain about when I will return to this course, I’ve experienced quite a bit of nostalgia as I prepare for each class period. Fueled by that nostalgia is a desire to engage my students as effectively as possible.

Years ago as a new  law professor, I preferred the Socratic method even in this upper level course, partly because it provided me with information about student engagement. I still use it to an extent, but this semester I have used some creative methods alongside it that have been transformational in my classroom.

QUICK WRITES: giving students a writing prompt during class, and then a few minutes of silence to reflect on that prompt in writing, is a technique I have come to love as a teacher.  This semester I assigned one during Day One of class, using a quote from the introduction of an old casebook I used years ago as the prompt.  The quote summed up the theme of my course, but I didn’t tell them that before assigning the quick write.  Quick writes help students focus on the material and synthesize it without getting caught up in their own insecurity about responding to their professor.  There is no time for that as I only give them around 5 minutes to write.  Furthermore, the written submissions being visible only to me provides a layer of security that speaking in class does not.  I have used quick writes a handful of other times this semester, and the process of giving direct written feedback on them to each student keeps me fresh as a teacher and helps me tweak my upcoming material in a targeted manner.  –N.B. this is burdensome in a large course unless you have a teaching or research assistant to help you read and respond to the quick writes.

PROBLEMS:  Twice this semester I have spent extensive time during class working a problem with the students that illustrates the material in the casebook. One problem was in their assigned reading, and we worked it in class together.  The other time I used this method, I broke them into groups and asked them to develop potential solutions, based on the legal  authority we had already studied, and to report back in writing. Each group member had to report on a separate aspect of the problem.

OTHER GROUP WORK: Building on a prompt in my casebook’s teaching manual, I recently stopped in the middle of class and divided them into two small groups, each of which was assigned one of the remaining cases we had yet to discuss during class. These were cases in the reading they had been assigned for that day.  I gave them prompts on PowerPoint slide regarding the fairness issues, the court’s analysis, and the justifications for the decision compared to the court’s alternative resolution not chosen.  They  met in groups for 10 minutes and then reported back to the entire class orally.

Engaging my students with these methods has drawn out even the most reserved student just a little bit. It has also given me the opportunity to engage deeply with each student privately through written exchanges on substantive and reflective issues. That private, written feedback enables me to guide their expectations about writing for my exam as well.  Finally, these creative teaching methods enrich and embolden our classroom environment. Students ask more daring questions and frame their responses to doctrinal questions with more sophistication than I have seen in prior classes.  If I have to take a break from teaching something I love so much, this is a way to enter that break with a sense that I have cultivated some innovative learning about the law.

 

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Summer Teaching Innovation Grants

Posted on March 30, 2016 by andicurcio

At many schools,  faculty members currently are applying for summer research grants.  This blog posts suggests that in addition to research grants, schools consider summer teaching innovation grants. Just like good scholarship, developing experiential learning courses or course components takes time.

Summer Teaching Innovation Grants – An Experiment that Worked

At Georgia State, like at many schools, our dean has encouraged us to integrate experiential learning throughout the curriculum.  And, he has put his money where his mouth is.

Faculty can compete for  summer teaching innovation grants which are funded at the same level as research grants. Both junior and senior faculty members have taken advantage of the summer grant  opportunities to either revamp existing courses or create new ones.

What A Grant Can Produce

Video Evidence

This  video illustrates some of the courses developed through the innovation grants.

We use  the video as  an admissions tool and at alumni functions to  highlight the law school’s innovative and experiential teaching across the curriculum.

Some Examples

In the video, you will hear about numerous courses that integrate experiential learning.  Many of those courses were developed as a result of summer teaching grants. For example:

Professor Corneill Stephens, after twenty years of teaching first year contracts, radically revamped the second semester of his course.  That semester now devotes substantial time to “hands on” contract drafting and interpretation.

Professor Erin Fuse Brown, who has only been teaching a few years, developed a capstone simulation health care transactions course, taught with practicing attorney adjuncts.

Professor Jessie Gabel Cino,  shortly after she was granted tenure, created a bankruptcy assistance program course in which students work with practicing attorneys to handle simple bankruptcies.

These courses, described in more detail in the video, are just a few examples of courses that came into being as a result of a summer teaching innovation grant.

Grant Criteria

The grant award process is competitive and judged by the following criteria:

  1. The project must result in the creation of a new class or redesign of an existing one that will integrate skills/professional values/experiential components not traditionally taught in conventional courses.
  1. The project proposal must include a statement of learning objectives and outcomes for the course.
  1. The project must include a plan for assessment of learning outcomes, including both formative as well as summative assessment methods, as appropriate.
  1. The project must be capable of being completed over the summer in which the grant is received and implemented preferably in the ensuing academic year.
  1. The project proposal describes a plan for making the new or redesigned course sustainable (capable of being taught on a recurring basis.

Creating a Culture of Teaching Innovation and Excellence

All grant recipients must present to the faculty in the semester following their grant-based course.  This presentation allows other faculty to learn about new courses or changes to existing courses and prompts thinking about one’s own course.

The video describes courses that came into being due to summer teaching innovation grants, and includes some course innovations that resulted simply from a culture which demonstrably values teaching innovation through concrete actions such as summer grants, weekly informal coffees to talk about teaching, and emphasis on teaching in our annual reports.

It’s not too late to for your dean to offer summer  grants as a way to further develop institutional support for teaching innovations.  If these are not already in place at your school, perhaps you can encourage your dean to consider this option.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Competencies-Based Legal Education

Posted on March 29, 2016 by Michele Pistone

[This was originally posted by the Clayton Christensen Institute on Disruptive Innovation]

 Last week, I discussed why law schools need to respond to the changing marketplace for legal services and legal education.  In thinking about how best to prepare for that changing world, law schools need to consider how competency-based educational models can be employed to advance educational objectives for students seeking to enter the market for legal services.  As Michael Horn and I explain in our new whitepaper, Disrupting Law School, regulatory protections that have sheltered law schools from competition will continue to subside.  In this new environment, law schools need to reimagine themselves as educators for students interested in learning about the legal services sector, not simply those seeking a JD.

One way to do this is to think about legal education from a blank slate.  Rather that try to retrofit our current pedagogy to address 21st century needs, instead we need to think about it from its inception — if one were to start a school today to educate those who want a career in the legal services field, what would that school look like?

Upstart competency-based education programs have done just that in other parts of higher education.  They provide at least three new considerations for traditional law school as they begin to think about and prepare for the future.

1. Time is no longer the measure of accomplishment

Online competency-based learning reverses the traditional relationship in education between time and student learning. In the traditional educational model, time is fixed while each student’s learning is variable. With online competency-based learning, the relationship between time and learning is reversed — time becomes the variable and each student’s learning becomes essentially fixed. Students process at their own pace, moving from topic to topic upon mastery of each. Those who need more time to master a concept before moving on to the next take the time they need, while others move ahead to the next set of material and learning objectives.

2. Centrality of competencies, learning outcomes, and assessments

Online competency-based programs shift the teaching pedagogy toward student-centered learning. In an online, competency-based program, faculty and instructional designers start by identifying the competencies students must master to achieve the desired learning outcomes and then work through each to understand how a student would demonstrate mastery of those objectives. Through constant feedback, students know how they are doing and what they need to do next and teachers can determine when students have mastered competencies and are ready to move forward. The assessments in other words are both forward looking—assessments that help determine what a student studies next—and backward looking —assessments that indicate whether a student has mastered the material.

3.  Modularization of course material provides more flexibility and different business models

Online competency-based learning is also changing key elements of the traditional higher education business model. Online technologies make it possible to modularize the learning process—that is, to break usual semester-long courses into shorter learning units or modules, which can be studied in sequence or separately. When material is packaged in online modules, it is easier to use for multiple educational purposes and multiple audiences in different combinations.

Stackable modules allow students to create individualized curricula based on their own learning goals and objectives. For students who attend law school knowing the area of law in which they want to practice—a segment of the student body currently underserved due to limited course offerings in any one topic at any one law school—modules open up opportunities to stack credentials from multiple sources. The long tail of the Internet opens up these opportunities; there may be sufficient student demand if online courses can aggregate demand and serve students from around the country or even the world.

Modules also eliminate duplication and optimize teaching resources. This flexible architecture can create an entirely new business model for law-related education. When learning is broken down into competencies—rather than semester-long courses—modules of learning can be packaged into different scalable programs for very different audiences—for example, paralegals, legal technicians, law students, lawyers (CLE), judges, administrative agencies, non-JDs working in law-related fields, foreign students, high school/college moot court teams, undergraduate students, journalists, clients, life-long learners, and so forth.  The possibilities abound.

This exercise can take us in a lot of different directions.  Every direction, though, will ask us to change and move beyond the status quo.  While change is hard, it is also necessary.  I hope our whitepaper provides sufficient impetus to get started.

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Great videos on law teaching!

Posted on March 29, 2016 by Margaret Moore Jackson

Here’s a link to eleven videos produced at the 2015 AALS Clinical Conference. Each one addresses pedagogical issues that law professors are currently grappling with, including assessment, infusing experiential education into doctrinal courses, encouraging learning through reflection, and teaching technology.

The AALS supported this project, as did the Planning Committee for 2015 AALS Conference on Clinical Legal Education. Take a look!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9Butr8LBC8yMXawcq8jjnw/playlists

Individual videos are available here:

Jeff Baker (Pepperdine University School of Law) Trust and High Expectations Improve Learning Outcomes

Esther Barron and Steve Reed (Northwestern University School of Law)Bringing Experiential Learning into the Traditional Classroom

Paul Bergman (UCLA Law), “Reel” Teaching – Teaching With Film Clips

Warren Binford (Willamette University College of Law) Designing Your Curriculum to Maximize Student Learning

Eduardo Capulong (University of Montana School of Law) Working With Actual Clients In The First Year

Alyson Carrel (Northwestern University School of Law) Disrupt the Norm: Technology for Today’s Classroom

Wallace Mlyniec (Georgetown University Law Center) 40 Years of Assessing Assessment

Michele Pistone (Villanova University Widger School of Law) Improving Learning Through Formative Assessment

Joy Radice (University of Tennessee College of Law) Thinking and Acting Like Lawyers: Reflection-in-Action in the Law School

Alex Scherr (University of Georgia School of Law) Integrating Reflection Into The Curriculum

Leah Wortham (The Catholic University of America) Equipping Law Students to Thrive in a Changing Legal Services Market

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“I won’t be in class; I have a job interview”: Dealing with a Changing 1L Experience

Posted on March 28, 2016 by Ben Bratman

As I regularly teach first-year students, I note with interest a proposed revision to NALP’s 1L Guidelines that would remove all date restrictions on interaction between 1Ls and career service professionals (currently disallowed before October 15) and between 1Ls and employers (currently disallowed before December 1). I also note, with disappointment, the growing number of times that 1L students are missing my Legal Writing class for a job interview or, in one recent case, even for a work shift. A colleague of mine reports her frustration with the same trend.

If adopted, the change to the NALP guidelines would further chip away at the conventional but no longer sacrosanct wisdom that 1Ls should be almost exclusively focused on their academic studies, especially in their first few months of law school. I expect that many schools clinging to that wisdom would have to loosen up existing approaches to the 1L experience, if they have not already.

By way of example, the administration at the school where I teach intentionally schedules 1L classes on all five days of the week for each section. This is consistent with our policy actively discouraging 1Ls from engaging in any employment outside of law school. But probably it is not consistent with shifting realities affecting 1Ls—the very realities that give rise, no doubt, to the proposal to reform the NALP guidelines.

Career services offices, which coordinate many 1L job interviews, simply cannot avoid all potential class conflicts—or at least they cannot where all 1Ls have class five days a week. I am very curious if other schools set aside a whole day of the week or multiple entire mornings or afternoons where there are no classes for 1Ls. I expect that more and more schools will need to consider adopting such an approach.

The challenge to law schools arises not just from the growing priority for 1Ls to search and interview for summer jobs, but also, I think, from a growing priority for at least some 1Ls to actually work in jobs—law-related or otherwise—during the academic year. Indeed, I hear from more and more 1Ls that they are working outside of law school. However, I expect that there remain many schools that, like mine, actively discourage 1L employment.

Interestingly, presuming the ABA House of Delegates goes along with a pending reform to ABA Standard 305, law schools will no longer be barred from offering academic credit to students working for compensation in an approved externship. (As of now, Interpretation 305-2 prohibits law schools from granting credit to a student for “participation in a field placement program for which the student receives compensation.”) Most current externship programs or opportunities are designed for 2Ls and 3Ls. But what should schools do about 1L students who need to work during the school year to make ends meet? I imagine that, if the change to Standard 305 is adopted, some of those 1Ls might be savvy enough to ask for academic credit for their work—presuming it is law-related—and then complain when they cannot get it because the work does not fall within the prescribed curriculum.

Even if my imagination is too wild on that point, the reality is that there are 1Ls in full-time J.D. programs who are working. And, anecdotally, I sense their numbers are rising. If I am right about that trend, perhaps some 1L curricular or programmatic reform is appropriate in response. Whether that means the development of elective 1L externship programs (for unpaid work in government and public interest positions too, of course) or something else, I’m not sure. But I am sure that, for better or worse, employment–searching for it and engaging in it–is changing the 1L experience.

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Disrupting Law School

Posted on March 21, 2016 by Michele Pistone

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In a new whitepaper, Disrupting Law School, Michael B. Horn and I explore various aspects of disruption in the legal services sector with an eye toward how law schools can respond proactively. As we state in the whitepaper, it is clear to us that law schools need to change. But many in the academy believe that we are insulated from disruption because of regulatory protections. In our view, reliance on this regulatory scheme for protection is misguided.

Heavily regulated industries can be disrupted. The taxi industry provides an example. Uber’s novel business model, which intentionally by-passed regulators, has been embraced by customers, investors, and drivers. As we have seen in other industries, once innovations like this accumulate sufficient market support, the regulations will ultimately be loosened to accommodate them.

It is no surprise, then, to see changes in the regulations affecting both lawyers and law schools. Horn and I identify at least three ways that regulations are opening up.

First, advances in technology are altering the traditional legal services value network. For decades lawyers have provided expensive customized solutions for each individual client. Now, the industry is seeing technological innovations bring more standardized, systematized, and, in some instances, commoditized offerings to the market. The rise of LegalZoom is an example of this kind of disruption. LegalZoomhasbeen challenged on regulatory grounds; the claims were that it was engaged in the unauthorized practice of law. LegalZoom won or settled the court challenges. Those successes have motivated it to expand upmarket, as is typical of disruptors.

Second, technological developments are breaking down the traditional rationale—the protection of the public—for granting lawyers a monopoly on the practice of law. State regulators of bar licensure are taking note. States are beginning to experiment with providing non-JDs limited licenses to provide legal services that until now only JDs could provide.

The State of Washington provides the first example.  It recently licensed legal technicians—non-JDs who are specially trained to advise clients in a limited practice area, in this case family law. Akin to a nurse practitioner, a limited license legal technician (LLLT) can perform many of the functions that JDs traditionally performed, including consulting and advising, completing and filing necessary legal documentation, and helping clients understand and navigate a complicated family law court system. Only two years old, this new model is already gaining traction outside of Washington; the bars in California, Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, and Utah, are each considering similar limited licensing options to authorize non-lawyer practitioners to practice in limited capacities in their states.

Finally, on top of the changes coming about through technological innovations and new licensing models, higher education itself is also seeing a variety of potential disruptors emerge, all powered at least in part through online learning. The startups can transform higher education by offering programs that are more flexible, more convenient and, often, more affordable than programs offered in the traditional higher education model. And because they are able to take advantage of a variety of new technologies, business models and teaching pedagogies, these players are positioning themselves to change the status quo in higher education. Here again, law schools may feel protected from the disruption that is coming toward the universities in which we sit because of strict ABA accreditation standards that limit online competition. But here, too, we warn against becoming too complacent when relying on existing regulatory protections.

The ABA recently granted a variance to Mitchell Hamline Law School to offer a blended online, in-person JD program. This acceptance of online learning within the JD, coupled with the ABA’s push for the adoption of learning outcomes and formative assessment, suggest that efforts to innovate using online technologies will find support by accreditors. And students may find online programs attractive as well. Judging from its first class, there is pent-up demand for such an offering; the students who enrolled in Mitchell Hamline’s blended program had higher predictors of success (LSAT and undergraduate GPA) than the class of students enrolled in the live JD program. The program’s former dean, Eric Janus, told me that students in the blended program even expressed gratitude to the school for offering them an opportunity to learn the law. That’s because before this offering became available, the alternative was nothing at all.

Ultimately, we in the legal academy must acknowledge that we are exposed to the same form of competition that has lead to the devastation of entire industries. And then act proactively to create an improved educational environment for the legal services industry.

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Centering Justice in Legal Education Reform Discourse

Posted on March 8, 2016 by Sameer M. Ashar

Thanks to Mary Lynch for inviting me to post on this blog about my essay, Deep Critique and Democratic Lawyering in Clinical Practice, which was published in February by California Law Review. Over the course of my work on the essay over a few years, I have come to ask three main questions:

(1) How does the justice-seeking mission of clinical education persist in the face of the rapid expansion of experiential education and the imminent retirement of many of the founders of modern clinical education?

(2) Is there a progressive clinical response to the crisis of legal education in the aftermath of the great recession of 2008?

(3) How can legal educators preserve the public interest, justice-seeking values of the legal profession in the face of contraction, commodification, automation, and outsourcing?

The questions have gotten harder to answer as time has passed, as the post-Carnegie period of experiential expansion fell way to the economic crisis and then to the cyclical and structural breakdown of the market for legal services and the subsequent collapse of the markets for post-graduate employment and law school admissions. Initially, during the short expansionary period, my thought was that justice-oriented clinicians had to engage in the pedagogical excavation of their own work in order to defend it and to claim a share of the resources being allocated by law school administrators. The standard litany of clinical skills is incomplete and tends to favor an attenuated form of clinical practice that prevents clinics from participating in urgent struggles for social and economic justice ongoing in all of our communities. Both non-strategic individual service and private business-oriented clinical models take clinics out of community struggle and place them in service of a conservative political posture that has been maintained by law schools for many years. These approaches also subdue and suppress the justice aspirations of our students.

The necessity for lawyers to think structurally, suggested by Gary Blasi and further supported by Nisha Agarwal and Jocelyn Simonson in their survey of critical theoretical work, suggested to me the idea of “deep critique.” We want our students to think structurally, but how can we begin to think with them outside of what seems currently possible? As we see repeatedly in many areas of struggle, from police

devin allen

Photo credit: Devin Allen

violence to low-wage worker exploitation, liberal legalism doesn’t get us very far. We can teach our students that law is incomplete and inadequate as the sole response to various social crises. But how can we begin to consider responses outside of the liberal legal imaginary? In my experience, organizers have been the ones who have helped me to see both the value of the legal tools that we train our students to use and their use in moving us toward new worlds. I wanted to capture this quality of deep structural thinking that we aspire to develop with our students, hence, “deep critique.”

The second feature of complex, justice-seeking clinical practice that I thought worth bringing to the surface was easier to describe because of the prior synthetic work of Ascanio Piomelli. Piomelli draws from a wide range of poverty lawyering and critical theoretical sources to define a form that he calls “Democratic Lawyering.” Many clinicians have thought hard about the role of the lawyer in community. Democratic lawyering has stuck with me because of its central animating idea that lawyers may serve to support grassroots collectives in politics and to help them convert their political ideals and aspirations into political struggle in various realms, including protest, electoral politics, and policy and legislation. This was a second quality encompassing a fairly broad skill set that I believe should be added to the list of teaching goals to which legal educators gravitate.

The economic crisis and the subsequent challenges to the legal profession and legal education necessitate further consideration. Although clinicians have a great deal more security now than at any time in the past and clinics are seen as core curricular offerings at many law schools, the perception that clinical education is an expensive luxury is entrenched within legal education, especially when budgets are being shrunk. Bob Kuehn has taken this argument apart. However, it seems essential to me that clinicians go further and articulate an affirmative vision of reform that centers entrenched social problems and clinical practice as the core generators of contemporary legal education. Scholars such as William Henderson and Brian Tamanaha have made a significant impact on the discourse with their reform proposals, which largely make clinical education marginal and, to varying degrees, accept the breakdown of the legal profession as a given. Neither of their reform visions contemplate how legal education might preserve and advance the public, justice-seeking values of the profession. There is little contemplation in these largely neoliberal approaches to higher education of a professional exercising independent judgment in the performance of their duties to clients and the public. In an otherwise highly insightful book, progressive scholar Robin West views clinical education as actually setting back the agenda of critical legal analysis. Clinicians’ views are often dismissed as being focused on status; we are, therefore, burdened with an extra responsibility to lay an intellectual foundation for the centering of clinical practice in legal education.

My essay flags these challenges in the legal education reform discourse, without providing a comprehensive response. In many ways, it is a call to legal educators to begin to articulate reform visions from the standpoint of our client communities and our idealistic students. In the context of unprecedented social movement activity in the United States, it is incumbent on teachers to think creatively about how we might mobilize our educational institutions to support democratic engagement  and to think structurally outside of the box of liberal legalism. Legal educators must consider how we train law students and contribute to the construction of our evolving profession, one not solely defined by economic efficiency, but instead by core commitments to justice and the public good.

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The Need for Resiliency

Posted on March 8, 2016 by sgeorge326

Why are some students able to handle setbacks and struggles in law school, particularly first year, while others seem almost paralyzed and stuck in a pattern of underperformance? The answer likely stems from their resilience—that is, the ability to “bounce back”. Resiliency is a set of skills that allow people to not just get through hard times, but to thrive and learn from them.

The pressures on new law students to do well are numerous, and in a tough job market, can seem tremendous. Whether it is a need to know they really “belong” in law school, to perform to personal or family expectations, or overriding concerns about the ability to get a job and repay students loans, the stresses are abundant. When students receive a grade lower than expected, as many do for possibly the first time, they can become mired in self-doubt, which can lead to a cycle of underperformance.

It is clear to those of us who teach these students that the worry and doubt get in the way of performance. Science is now showing us exactly how, and making the argument that resilience or “grit” is as necessary to law school success as a high LSAT score. Thanks to modern imaging, scientists now know how our brains perform during times of stress. Watching blood flows, scientists can see how different people react to stress. And while most of us might think of stress as major catastrophes—fires, floods, and the like, our bodies react to smaller stresses like traffic, disagreeable bosses, or difficult exams, in much the same way. Even feelings like rejection or loneliness stoke this stress response in the brain. The neural pathways which are stimulated by all these stressors, big or small, become stronger and stronger the more stressed we are. Soon, this stressful mode of thinking and operating can become our norm. The good news is that science shows the brain can be trained in a way that does not use the stress neural pathways, and in time this can become the new way to handle stress.

The secret lies in the connection between the frontal cortex—the brain’s manager, and the amygdala- the brain’s emotional center. A stronger connection means the frontal cortex is better able to control the amygdala and tell it to calm down. How to build that connection? Here are some simple tips:

  1. Face the things you fear, don’t run from them. This relaxes the fear circuit.
  2. Develop a strong network of social support. One study revealed that when people were exposed to a stressor in a lab, heart rate and blood pressure did not rise as much if they were with a friend or loved one, as opposed to receiving that news alone.
  3. Work the body’s muscles through exercise. This also builds resiliency in the brain because exercise spurs development of new neural pathways, which can replace those depleted by stress.
  4. Be mindful. A 2010 Harvard study showed people spend 47% of their day thinking about things other than what they are actually doing. There are myriad materials and apps available online-from simple breathing exercises to guided meditations.
  5. Reach for support when needed and share your true feelings.
  6. Don’t beat yourself up or dwell on the past. Pushing out the negative thoughts with positive ones can lead to dramatic reductions in stress and increases in resiliency.

Students who can tamp down their stress responses will be more able to focus and perform as they hoped when joining law school.

 

 

 

 

 

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Collaborative Doctrinal Teaching Across Institutions: A Successful Experiment

Posted on February 22, 2016 by andicurcio

By:  Andi Curcio and Eileen Kaufman

For most doctrinal faculty, teaching is a relatively solitary activity. While our clinical and legal writing colleagues regularly collaborate, and we encourage student collaborative learning, doctrinal faculty tend to draft our syllabus, develop our lesson plans, teach our courses and design and administer our assessments largely without input from colleagues.

We operate this way because it is part of legal academic culture, because we deem solitary class planning to be more efficient, and because we value independence in deciding what to teach, how to teach and what and how to assess.

Last Fall, two of us – experienced law professors working at different law schools and both teaching a large section Evidence course- decided to break with the cultural tradition of flying solo when it comes to doctrinal teaching.

We found that collaboration did not take more time than working on our own. Nor did collaboration impinge on our academic freedom. In fact, the collaborative process challenged us to engage deeply with both the material and our pedagogy in ways that made us stronger teachers.

Below, we raise questions to consider when deciding to collaborate, describe our collaborative model, and highlight the benefits that resulted from our collaborative work.

Questions Before Collaborating

Why collaborate? The first question you must answer is whether you want to collaborate and if so, what you want out of the experience. For example, do you want to engage in give-and-take that enhances your teaching, have a sounding board for tough doctrinal or teaching issues, experiment with new teaching materials and techniques, improve your efficiency by a “divide and conquer” approach to class planning and/or assessments?

How extensive a collaboration? Once you identify why you want to collaborate, you can better decide how much collaboration works for you. The collaboration could be as informal as simply using each other as a resource when confronting tough questions. You could take the collaboration one step further and agree to a common syllabus. Or you could dive way in and co-design all teaching materials, assessments, and grading rubrics.

Who should you collaborate with? The final, and perhaps most important, question is who to work with. Do you want to work with someone who has a similar teaching philosophy, prepares in advance or tends to wait until the last minute, has the same or a different level of teaching experience, works at the same institution or a different one? Whatever the answer to those questions, the key to a successful collaboration is finding someone you respect and can communicate with comfortably, freely and honestly.

Our Collaborative Method

We briefly discuss our collaborative method, answering the questions above, to illustrate one way to engage in doctrinal teaching collaboration.

Choosing A Collaborator and Collaboration Method:  We had known each other for years and had worked together on other projects. One of us had taught Evidence for 15 years, the other, although an experienced teacher, was relatively new to the subject. We deeply respected each other as teachers and knew we would learn a lot from each other.

We chose the full-blown model of collaboration that included using the same course materials, employing clickers in the classroom, and co-designing all teaching materials, assessments and grading rubrics.  Our collaborative goals included enhancing student learning of complex and difficult material, improving our teaching, and developing fair and reliable assessments.

Implementing the Collaborative Model: With our collaborative goals in mind, we selected a book that neither of us had previously used, that we thought would work best for both sets of students. We then made decisions about course content and coverage and the number and type of assessments. Once those decisions were made, one of us drafted the syllabus and the other edited it.

Although we each prepared our own classes, we shared power points and hypotheticals so that our classes fairly closely mirrored each other. If one of us taught a class first, and ran into an area or problem that confused students, we alerted the other to the problem and discussed ways to remedy the confusion.

We utilized a number of assessments – TWEN quizzes, practice essays followed by detailed grading rubrics, a self-assessment, a midterm and a final exam. For all of the assessments, one of us took the lead and the other edited the exam. We reversed roles for the grading rubric – if one of us drafted the exam, the other drafted the rubric. This distributed the workload and helped enormously in spotting ambiguities or problems that might undermine the question’s validity.

While we spoke somewhat regularly, most of our collaborative work was done via email so we could do it at our respective convenience.

The Benefits

The collaborative process allowed us to benefit from each other’s knowledge, skills and ideas. We had a sounding board to discuss how best to teach a complex doctrinal issue. We had another set of eyes to help ensure exam questions were clearly written, and that the questions, as well as the overall exam, tested what we sought to assess. When grading, we were able to compare how we were making the “close calls.”

Teaching Benefits:  As the semester progressed, we shared thoughts and ideas about how to shift our teaching when students struggled with either concepts or analyses. For example, we realized early on that the use of clickers in the classroom was helping students on multiple choice questions but was not addressing analytical skills. Since we were using the same classroom materials and assessments, we were able to track and compare performance and make important adjustments as the semester progressed.

We discussed problems we both observed with our respective students’ legal analysis. We brainstormed solutions and decided we should: take a minute of class time for students to write out a rule before launching into hypotheticals or discussions of the rule; require students to provide more analysis in their explanations of clicker questions; and use clicker slides to drill black letter law and application of law to new facts.  We added more practice essays and incorporated teaching methodologies that focused on building students’ analytical and essay writing skills.

These changes to our teaching methodologies may not have occurred had we both been teaching our own courses.

Assessment Benefits:  Working together on assessments was tremendously helpful. The drafting stage took somewhat longer because another set of eyes resulted in changes to the initial draft, but the collaboration unquestionably improved our efficiency when it came to grading.  Because we engaged in fairly extensive give and take in the exam drafting process, we avoided some of the drafting mistakes that sometimes lead to grading issues. Additionally, comparing how we were applying the rubric reassured us that our judgment calls made pedagogical sense and allowed us to more efficiently grade because we did not angst over the judgment calls.

Our Take Away

For the reasons outlined above, we believe that the collaboration improved our teaching, and hopefully improved our students’ learning. It also simply was fun to work together.

While collaboration amongst doctrinal faculty members may not be the norm, and may not be for everyone, we found it incredibly rewarding and we encourage others to experiment with it.

As a true testament to its value, we are doing it again next Fall.

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The Heart of a Justice

Posted on February 19, 2016 by Irene Scharf

It’s interesting that, regardless of his conservative bona fides, Justice Scalia’s “best friend” on the court was Justice Ginsburg, one of the more liberal Justices.  The two, and their spouses, apparently socialized regularly.   As a law professor who works with students on a daily basis, I hope this aspect of Justice Scalia can provide a lesson to students and us all. This friendship of opposites demonstrates that a person’s humanity is measured by far more than the sum of one’s political views.

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Insights and Advice regarding Professional Identity

Posted on February 17, 2016 by rebeccaharp

While thinking about his Negotiations course, Best Practices Reader and University of Missouri Law Professor John Lande developed an exercise to provide insight into how the act of negotiation intersects with professional identity.  Prof. Lande’s article guides professors who wish to have their students explore this subject.  The exercise involves thinking about what a client relationship could be and the expectations associated with the relationship through the examination of law firm websites.  You can read more about one way to engage students in thoughts about professional identity here .

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Teaching Tips to Think about Early in the New Semester- By Steven Friedland

Posted on February 3, 2016 by Steven Friedland

With the beginning of a new semester upon us, these thoughts and tips are a great thing to keep in the back of everyone’s mind whether you are a student or a professor.  This great post was done by Steven Friedland.

Flexibility and Mobility in Law School Learning

As a professor who has been teaching for more than two decades, it is easy to feel like a dinosaur in classes populated by students mostly in their 20s.  But within that notion lies the fact that not only do ages change, but cultures as well.  It is evident that within the born-digital generation, cultural understandings, particularly involving learning, are different than mine.

While I think cross-cultural competency is more important than ever in this global era, it also applies to us teaching dinosaurs.  I learned in law school in a linear and fixed fashion – go to class, take notes, go to the library, study and prepare for the next class.  Based on studies and my own anecdotal evidence, there is an increasing preference for mobility and flexibility in learning.  I am becoming a believer in both — using Web platforms like TWEN, Blackboard or Moodle as integral parts of a course, and allowing students to have flexibility in where and when they learn.

I am now experimenting in doctrinal courses to include several flex classes — audiotaped, with an option to take each over a 24 hour period in a self-paced fashion.  These self-paced classes are combined with deliverables — writing an answer to a problem based on the class material and then posting it on the Web platform, or doing some other relevant task based on the material to ensure that some form of learning has occurred.  So far, these classes have been well-received; to my surprise, students like the flexibility about when they take class as much as the remote opportunity. I am enjoying shaking it up in this way.  What is the saying?  Even an old dinosaur can learn….

 

Note-Taking Breaks

In a law school class, there are a variety of note-takers.  Some are the “court reporters,” taking down every word.  Some take far fewer notes, within their own organizational schemes. Many students are using computers, with note-taking programs. I also have had some “deep observers,” who appear to take no notes at all.

But all students seem to rely on the notes they take in putting a course together for deep understanding, especially in the first year of school.  Interestingly, teachers do not generally know how students are taking notes and whether those notes taken are even accurate.  This is why I have started using a colleague’s technique (yes, I like borrowing good ideas from others, no hiding there), of taking “note breaks” in the middle of a doctrinal class — allowing students to check their notes with other students, particularly about important rules, principles or insights. I usually prompt the break by asking, “What were the most important points in class so far?”  This has several effects.  Everyone perks up and the students appear present and engaged.  Students also are more likely to ask questions about what has occurred thus far.  I get useful feedback on what I have communicated well and what I have done poorly.  So all the way around, I find it to be a helpful technique. When students walk out of class, they should be able to rely on and have ready access to useful notes.

 

Retention and Retrieval

Lots of studies have been done that show experts learn differently than novices.  In any educational process, the goal is to move up the scale, from unconscious incompetence, to conscious incompetence, to conscious competence, to the highest level, unconscious competence.  I know about the lowest level, having been there in law school and many other contexts (just thinking back on the longest years of my life taking piano lessons).  The highest level of competence is epitomized by Captain Sully, the U.S. Air pilot who landed his commercial plane without engines in the Hudson River.

So what learning features are associated with experts? Experts recognize patterns of information, have deep understanding of material within a domain, organize their information well for ready access, and constantly self-monitor.  We can learn from these characteristics in law school.  It is traditional for law school professors to evaluate student performance through a single final examination, (although sometimes mid-terms are also offered).  The traditional summative evaluation framework promotes a particular type of studying.  Students study like crazy just before an exam, and then dump all of their knowledge on the test. (This approach was a familiar one for me when I was in school.) To help students progress from novice to expert, though, we should teach for long-term retention and retrieval.  This can occur through the use of numerous problems and opportunities throughout a course by which to practice organizing and storing material before a final exam, the use of structures or outlines by which to approach topics, and a greater emphasis on mnemonics, anchor words and other learning devices.   Sometimes, in our desire to cover great swaths of material, we don’t drill as deeply as we could or should.

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Ten Questions to Ask Yourself Before Volunteering

Posted on January 29, 2016 by dmaranville

As a follow-up to my previous post on “-crastination”, Creativity and the Importance of Downtime, I’m sharing a copy of my favorite handout for helping all of us, students and faculty alike, learn to engage in discernment around saying no, and yes.

TEN QUESTIONS
Ask yourself these questions

Before volunteering your time, skills & energy to ANYTHING!

  • Is there a chance I will find myself changed by this work?
  • Does this work express my values, the things I say are important to me?
  • Will this put me with people I want to know better?
  • Will doing this help me know myself better?
  • Do I enjoy thinking of myself as a person who would do this?
  • Do I have a special gift to share?
  • When I look back in a year or ten years, will I remember doing this?
  • Will this make me feel more connected or more disjointed?
  • What will I need to say NO to in order to say YES to this?
  • Will it be FUN!

 

Thanks for Maylin Harndon for sharing her version of this with me.

 

 

 

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Formative Assessments – Valuable Educational Tool, Not as Hard (or Time-Intensive) as Some Think

Posted on January 28, 2016 by benjmad

New ABA Standard 314 requires laws schools to use “formative assessments” a fancy phrase for a simple concept: giving students feedback on how they are progressing in a course. Anyone who has seen the data knows that formative assessment helps student learning. Most schools of higher education have used formative assessments for years. Law teaching is a latecomer to this process.

As an Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, I have the role in our school of helping to promote formative assessment in our classes. I have used formative assessment for several years. However, I wanted to develop a method that was effective but not overly time-consuming.   I think that most law professors, if they care about their students, will try out a method if it does not overload them.

I pondered the area of civil procedure that I find consistently less impressive results on final exams than I would expect.   The area of removal came to mind. The requirements for removal are spelled out in the removal statutes. Yet the requirements are many—and picky too.   If the defendant removing a case does not cross her “t’s” and dot her “I’s,” she faces remand for a seemingly minor omission.

So, here was the exercise. I wrote a letter to the students, as a client from a state other than the one in which they were lawyers. I told the “lawyers” that I was a nonresident and wanted to know whether my case could be taken from state court where it was filed to federal court. I also said that I liked to know each step in the process and so wanted them to explain those steps and all deadlines.

Students received this letter the day we finished removal and had a week to prepare a response letter. I developed a checklist of the removal requirements and had my Teaching Assistant (TA) take a first run through, checking the steps that had been accurately described and putting an X next to those that were not described. The form ended with two categories: “This case is vulnerable to a motion to remand [with a blank after that] and “This case is safe from a motion to remand [again, with a blank line after].”

I then checked the TA’s marks against each letter—a process that took about an hour and a half for almost 70 students.   More than half missed something in the removal requirements such that I could mark the box that said the case was vulnerable to remand. The most teling point for most students was my marking the box that showed their case was vulnerable to a remand because they had not read the statute carefully and followed through diligently.

This feedback seemed to help. Many students made appointments to revisit removal and see how they had missed a requirement. The final exam results showed the strongest command of removal I have seen in 13 years of teaching this subject.

I already knew that providing feedback to students helped learning. What I had not established before is that the formative assessment can be done effectively without a great deal of time and effort. Using a TA helped with that, sure. Her work helped me to go more quickly through the letters and spot omissions.

I will now offer this formative assessment as an example for my colleagues. I’ll encourage my colleagues to consider ways in which they can develop similar ways to provide students feedback. The adoption of Standard 314 mandates such teaching, but the truth is law school ought to have been doing this already.   Now, I can advocate for providing students feedback and credibly say it does not have to take excessive time. Not wanting to use the “you’d better comply with Standard 314” card, I hope that the example will encourage professors to explore formative assessment. Once they see the benefits, my hope is that the benefits of the process will sell itself. Of course, for the recalcitrant, there’s always the reminder of an ABA site visit.

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Touro’s Law Center’s Journal of Experiential Learning

Posted on January 24, 2016 by Patricia Salkin

The second issue of Touro Law Center’s Journal of Experiential Learning is now available online at http://www.tourolaw.edu/jel/?pageid=997.

This issue is devoted to incubator and residency programs and their contribution to legal education, particularly to the post-JD part of the educational continuum.  The creator of the law school incubator movement, Fred Rooney,  served as the guest editor for this edition.  Articles for the Incubator & Residency issue include:

Volume I, Number 2, Fall 2015
Table of Contents:

 

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