ABA Standards Review Committee votes for 6 credits of experiential learning

Posted on July 17, 2013 by Michele Pistone

Karen Sloan at the National Law Journal reports that the ABA Standards Review Committee made some decisions during its recent meeting.  In addition to eliminating the faculty-student ratio, here are some other highlights from her article:

• The committee voted to require law students to complete at least six credit hours of experiential coursework—clinics, externships or simulation courses. That would be up from the existing one credit-hour requirement, but less than the 15 hours suggested by the Clinical Legal Education Association or the 15 hours being pursued by the State Bar of California.

• It adopted a new student-learning outcomes requirement. Law schools would have to establish a list of competencies that students must achieve and assess whether they are meeting those goals. This measure is intended to make schools look beyond bar-pass rates to determine whether they are meeting student needs. However, the recommended standard leaves law schools plenty of leeway in determining what the learning outcomes should be and how to assess them.

• The committee voted to increase the number of credits law students may receive from distance learning classes from 12 to 15 and eliminated the rule that students may take no more than four distance-learning credits per semester. Students could take a full semester of courses away from their home campus.

Read more: here.

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New Functionality to the Best Practices Blog

Posted on July 11, 2013 by M. Aaron Bates

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

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

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NYT – The Unseen Costs of Cutting Law School Faculty

Posted on July 10, 2013 by Michele Pistone

Take a look at this NYT’s article by University of San Diego Professor, Vic Fleischer, noting that “The law school at Seton Hall University has put its untenured faculty on legal notice that their contracts may not be renewed for the 2014-15 academic year.”  While disagreeing with the Seton Hall decision, Fleischer offers some suggestions of his own on how law schools could cut costs, “Post-tenure review (by faculty, not administrators) can ensure that faculty members remain productive. Libraries can be moved online. Clinics can be closed, and adjunct faculty can be better utilized to team-teach practical courses alongside research faculty. The size of the administrative staff can be pared down, especially those who manage programs that might be considered luxuries.”  

At a time when law schools are being criticized for paying insufficient attention to training in practical lawyering skills and professional values (not to mention, the advent of scalable online teaching technologies), I do not see how closing clinics is the answer.  I would prefer for the discussion to recognize that if we eliminate clinics altogether, then what remains to be taught in law schools could easily move online.  In an article I will be sending out next week, I go into this in a lot more depth. 

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Lost Track of the Painfully Slow ABA Comprehensive Accreditation Review? ALERT – this week’s meeting is a HOT one!

Posted on July 10, 2013 by Mary A. Lynch

In September of 2008, the ABA Council of the Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar (Council) initiated a Comprehensive Review of law school accreditation standards charging the Standards Review Committee (SRC) of the Section to engage in a two year review.  (Yup, it was supposed to be two years!) Back then, although the spiraling costs of legal education and increases in law student debt were of concern to many readers of this site, potential students were still applying to law schools in great numbers. Institutions had not yet experienced the current economic free fall and, hence, many legal educators tried to forestall the need for dramatic change.

Since 2008, much has changed.  As the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA) notes in its latest comment to the SRC proposed revisions,

If clouds were gathering when the review began, the storm has now broken and lashes legal education. The need to better prepare students for practice is urgent and we cannot continue as we were.

And yet, the comprehensive review process has continued to chug along amidst the ups and downs of calls for reform of legal education and the transition from one roster of Standard Review Committee (SRC) members to another without clearly articulating any standards which directly respond to the calls or need. It also has continued to tinker with the standards without explicit connection with the newly formed taskforce on The Future of Legal Education.

This weekend, the SRC will meet again in Chicago on July 12 and 13. The Committee agenda focuses on issues concerning Faculty, Curriculum and Bar Passage. If you want to get a sense of the prior discussions, you can view the material prepared for this weekend’s meeting here, which includes an agenda, the minutes of the April SRC meeting, and current drafts of the proposed standards.

I want to call our readers attention to a few important issues. First, the Chair of the SRC , former Dean and Professor Jeff Lewis, told the Council that his committee would be finished with their work on Chapters 3 (Program of Legal Education) and 4 (The Faculty) at this July meeting. (FYI – once the SRC finishes its deliberations on a particular chapter of the standards, it sends its proposal to the Council which can amend it before sending it out for notice and comment before final adoption.) Thus, we should pay close attention to the current proposed revisions concerning those chapters and the outcome of this weekend’s meeting. Since Chapters 3 and 4 involve who will be teaching and what will be required to be taught, these revisions have the potential to redeem and re-invent legal education, and to encourage better preparation of students for the new global economy. Unfortunately, this weekend, the SRC may simply end up affirming the old status quo in new language and, sadly, even turn back the clock two decades on the status of clinical faculty.

With respect to Chapter 3 and the Program of Legal Education, the current SRC proposed revisions fail to include an expanded and updated vision of legal education. For example, the draft fails to consider the kind of innovative changes demanded by the profession, such as the recent call by the California State Bar Task Force on Admissions for pre-admissions practical skills training (see earlier post here), as well as the call by the Clinical Legal Education Association for the Council to expand accreditation requirements to include 15 credits in experiential learning, with at least one required law clinic or externship (see post on request here). CLEA’s request also compared the experiential requirements for other professional schools (from a 1/4 to  1/2 ratio) to legal education’s negligible 1:83 ratio. (You can find all of CLEA’s comments here.)

With respect to Chapter 4, four alternative draft proposals addressing tenure and security of position have been submitted to the Committee. It is unclear from my reading of the April minutes whether the SRC will make a recommendation or send up competing proposals. The proposals include different language and standards with respect to “competence,” “attracting and retaining,” “academic freedom,” “governance rights,” and tenure and/or security of position for faculty and, in particular,  clinical and lawyering faculty.  It is worth a look at CLEA’s multiple comments on these drafts (here and here). The SRC should pay closer attention to the profession and society’s call for better professional preparation of law students and avoid instituting standards which devalue the very educators who engage in the professional formation of law students.

Finally, the joint comments on Standard 315 submitted by the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT) and CLEA detail cogent concerns about the proposed bar passage revisions including the imposition of a flat nationwide rate and increases to the ultimate standard without study of the consequences for diversity in our law schools. This latter issue could haunt us for many years into the future and diminish our profession’s continued ability to claim its civic nature and justice orientation. (see earlier post on National Law Journal article). Notably, there was a groundswell of opposition to the proposed revisions from minority bar associations and minority members of Congress who filed comments with the Standards Review Committee.

Priorities everywhere have changed since 2008 and the SRC process should reflect the new normal. Hopefully this weekend, the SRC deliberations will move beyond the traditional status quo and demonstrate an understanding of the changes needed to redeem legal education.

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My Summer Reading List

Posted on July 9, 2013 by Nancy Cook

My Summer Reading List

by Nancy Cook

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

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

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

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

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

I’m also reading:

100 Diagrams That Changed the World by Scott Christianson

As Long As Trees Last by Hoa Nguyen

Building Stories by Chris Ware

Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton

Creative Conspiracy by Leigh Thompson

inGenius: A Crash Course in Creativity by Tina Seelig

Quiet by Susan Gain

Red Thread Thinking by Debra Kaye   

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Can we teach empathy to law students?

Posted on July 4, 2013 by Michele Pistone

Empathy is among the factors that Shultz and Zedeck found make effective lawyers. Now, we read that it is the no. 1 job skill for 2020. Can we instill empathy in our students? Teach them to be empathetic? How?

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More on CA Bar Task Force proposal

Posted on July 2, 2013 by Michele Pistone

This is from the California Bar Task Force on Admission Regulation Reform: Phase 1 Final Report. Our proposed recommendations, in brief overview, are as follows:

• Pre-admission: A competency training requirement fulfilled prior to admission to practice. There would be two routes for fulfillment of this pre-admission competency training requirement: (a) at any time in law school, a candidate for admission must have taken at least 15 units of practice-based, experiential course work that is designed to develop law practice competencies, and (b) in lieu of some or all of the 15 units of practice-based, experiential course work, a candidate for admission may opt to participate in a Bar-approved externship, clerkship or apprenticeship at any time during or following completion of law school;

• Pre-admission or post-admission: An additional competency training requirement, fulfilled either at the pre- or post- admission stage, where 50 hours of legal services is specifically devoted to pro bono or modest means clients. Credit towards those hours would be available for “in-the-field” experience under the supervision and guidance of a licensed practitioner or a judicial officer; and,

• Post-admission: 10 additional hours of Mandatory Continuing Legal Education (“MCLE”) courses for new lawyers, over and above the required MCLE hours for all active members of the Bar, specifically focused on law practice competency training. Alternatively, credit towards these hours would be available for participation in mentoring programs. 

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CLEA calls on ABA to require 15 credits of experiential learning

Posted on July 1, 2013 by Michele Pistone

Kate Kruse, President of the Clinical Legal Education Association, reports that CLEA called on the ABA Council on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar to expand accreditation requirements to include 15 credits in experiential learning.  

Today, the Clinical Legal Education Association (CLEA), the nation’s largest association of law professors, formally petitioned Council of the American Bar Association’s Section for Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar to amend its law school accreditation standards to require every J.D. law student to complete the equivalent of at least 15 semester credit hours after the first year of law school in practice-based, experiential courses, such as law clinics, field placements, or skills simulation courses, with at least one course in a law clinic or externship. 

Repeated ABA studies have shown the need to enhance significantly the professional skills training of students in law schools. However, the Section has done very little to address these persistent calls for reform. Current law school accreditation standards only require a single credit of experiential learning out of an average of 89 total academic credits, a dismal 1% of a law student’s preparation for practice. Other professions (such as medicine, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary, social work, etc.) require that at least one quarter, and up to more than one half, of a graduate’s pre-licensing education be in role in supervised professional practice.

CLEA contends that the present standards do not adequately prepare students for the practice of law and that 15 hours of professional experience (representing about one-sixth of a student’s total credit hours) are certainly the minimum necessary to ensure that law school graduates are competent to begin practicing law. Concerned that the ABA was not doing enough, the California State Bar Task Force on Admissions Regulation Reform recently proposed a similar pre-admission practical skills training program for all law students seeking admission to the California bar.  CLEA’s proposed amendment, filed under Rule 803(d) of the ABA Rules of Procedure for Approving Law Schools, requires the ABA to formally refer the request to committee and report back with a recommendation regarding the proposal.

-Kate Kruse

CLEA President

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ABA considers raising bar passage rate for law schools

Posted on June 27, 2013 by Michele Pistone

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

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A Student’s Perspective on Technology in the Classroom

Posted on June 24, 2013 by M. Aaron Bates

I have been a student at two law schools now: one is the well-established Albany Law and the other is a new law school in Tennessee that just graduated its first class in May, the Lincoln Memorial University’s Duncan School of Law. There are, of course, vast differences between the two schools, but my post today is intended to talk about the relative approaches to legal instruction in relation to technology in the classroom. Of course, each professor has his or her own methods for teaching any given class; however, there are stark differences between the over-arching practices of each school. While Duncan may not have the longest history as an institution, the school was able to develop innovative techniques regarding the  use of technology and progressive teaching methodology without being burdened by “tradition” or resistance to change.

Priding itself on its technology in the classroom, Duncan professors made prevalent use of audio-visual presentations (charts, power point slides, etc.) and computer-aided instructional techniques. Among the practices supplementing traditional instruction methods were daily “turning point quizzes.” At the beginning of each class, students were electronically asked a series of questions regarding the materials covered in the previous class; some classes graded these quizzes, others were merely for instructional purposes. The students would respond (usually by answering MBE-style multiple choice questions), and their answers would be displayed in poll-results format. Based on the results, the instructor was able to spot where the students lacked a complete understanding of the material and was better able to proceed with the day’s class–building on previous understanding towards a more complete instruction method. These “turning point” quizzes are similar to “Clicker” quizzes, except that the turning point quizzes could also have varied answer formats (such as short answer and essay responses).

The instruction style at Albany Law seems to be more traditional, that is, the instructor usually uses a modified Socratic method. I have been in classes that have taken a more practical approach, even including simulated cases–this is a somewhat recent addition presumably brought about by our Best Practices efforts. Of course, once the class period is over, there is typically little “looking back.” While material certainly built upon previous topics, the process is sometimes less clear. During the previous year (my first year at Albany Law), I found myself missing the constant feedback of the “turning point” quizzes and the ability to go back and review slides to revisit lectures if I needed clarification of some topic that was covered. I do not intend to say that my education was somehow better at my previous school than it is now–I have had teachers so glued to the textbook and their powerpoint presentations that they barely took time to actually teach–but the use of technology in the classroom to further outcome-based learning techniques was a crucial instrument to my learning process.

Of course, Duncan is in its relative infancy. The students did not have access to the clinical and practical experiences available to students at a more developed school with a more extensive network of connections. I would suggest a blending of the two styles: student-oriented outcome-based learning (perhaps through the use of reviewable technology and turning point quizzes to supplement the more doctrinal courses) and clinical/practical experiences.

If anyone can think of some practical ways to incorporate the use of technology in a class to further outcome-based techniques, please share your ideas in the comments.

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Legal Texts that Incorporate Practical Problem-Solving and Professional Skills Development

Posted on June 24, 2013 by M. Aaron Bates

Associate Professor of Law at the University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, Deborah T. Eisenberg has been compiling a list of resources for teaching practical legal skills.

“The ABA Dispute Resolution Section sponsors a website that includes resources for teaching practical problem-solving and professional skills: http://leaps.uoregon.edu/. We are developing a list of textbooks that incorporate practical problem-solving and professional skills into the teaching of subject areas that have traditionally been taught in a lecture-based, case analysis format. Feel free to take a look at this list, and circulate to your colleagues, as you select coursebooks for next year.

In addition, if you know of books that should be added to the list, please let me know. I know many of you teach across the curriculum. I’ll post this to the LEAPS website in about two weeks to allow time to incorporate your suggestions (finding these books is more difficult than it should be!). Note that books focused on ADR, clinical education, and legal writing are not included because nearly all of those books incorporate practical problem-solving and skills. We’re trying to be a resource for professors who would like to move away from lecture-based formats in teaching “doctrinal” courses.”

You can view the list under the cut. Continue reading →

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Maximizing Active Learning

Posted on June 20, 2013 by M. Aaron Bates

The Institute for Law Teaching and Learning has some fascinating ideas about getting students invested in the materials they are learning. Most recently, Sophie M. Sparrow at the University of New Hampshire School of Law wrote:

“Engaging students in active learning has long been one of my main teaching practices. As many of us know, educational experts have found that students learn more when they are actively engaged, such as by speaking, writing, or discussing, rather than listening to a lecture or discussion. Having just completed a three-day workshop with educational expert L. Dee Fink on course design, however, I learned that I should redesign my approach if I want maximize what students learn from their active learning assignments. This month’s idea is about how to improve active learning exercises.”

Continue reading here.

Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Best Practices for Institutional Effectiveness, Best Practices, Outcomes & Assessment Techniques, Teaching Methodology | 1 Comment »

New CELT Assistant

Posted on June 17, 2013 by M. Aaron Bates

To our valued bloggers and readers,

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

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

Thank you for your readership and your loyalty!

-M. Aaron Bates
MBates@albanylaw.edu

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California Bar – bold proposal to require skills training

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Michele Pistone

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

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

 
Importantly, the Task Force Report includes a recommendation that all applicants for admission to the California bar complete 15 credits of professional skills training while in law school or engage in other pre-admission apprenticeships.  If this proposal passes, it has the potential for widespread effect on law schools (even outside of California) whose students sit for the California bar.

 
As with most good ideas, of course, the “devil is in the details.”  CLEA has been following the debate within California with interest and has submitted three statements, on April 17, May 30, and June 10, which can be found on the CLEA website’s Advocacy page.  In these statements, we urge the Task Force to give its pre-admission skills training requirement teeth and to keep it from being watered down with definitions of professional skills courses that are so broad or vague that they fail to capture the type or quality of experiential education that prepares students for the practice of law.  And, we urge that at least one-third of the pre-admission requirement be devoted to experiential learning in clinics or externships, where students get the uniquely valuable opportunity to learn in real-practice settings.
 
If the California Task Force adopts its Report tomorrow, the recommendations will go on to the State Bar and then the California Supreme Court for approval–a process that might happen as quickly as the end of this summer.  Then, the work of an implementation committee will begin, hammering out some of the difficult details of the scope and definition of the professional skills requirement.

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CALI conference June 13-15 in Chicago

Posted on June 10, 2013 by Michele Pistone

If you’ll be in the Chicago area this week, consider attending the CALI conference.  Info is available here.   This year’s conference is about Driving Innovation and will feature talks by Bill Henderson, Barbara Glesner-Fines, Conrad Johnson and many other innovators in legal education.  The conference will also include a number of session on one of my favorite law school innovations, flipped learning.  Need a primer on flipped learning, watch my video, available on the LegalED site and here.

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