The AALS’s Standing Committee on Curriculum Issues sent an e-mail to law school deans and others last Friday requesting information about “ways in which law teachers are enriching their classroom teaching by bringing in background materials that go beyond the judicial opinion.” Continue reading
Filed under: Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | 1 Comment »
Cost is often cited as an obstacle to providing real experiential learning opportunities. Overcoming those cost barriers will require creativity. That’s one reason I’m so excited about an experiment coming out of the Washington state Access to Justice Board’s ATJ & the Law Schools Committee. Next fall three legal services providers will collaborate with the three Washington Law Schools on the Rubin Externship Advocacy Project , a full-time externship during the fall term. The externship will be supported by an intensive jointly developed classroom component in which attorneys from the three legal services providers, as well as faculty from the three law schools will participate. Can it be a model for additional collaborative efforts? We’ll see.
Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum | 2 Comments »
Why are play, improvisation, and creativity showing up in so many different conferences and publications these days? And what do they have to do with best practices in legal education?
The 2008 AALS Conference in New York included an Open Source presentation on play, and a Clinical Section presentation on improvisation. The 2008 Clinical Conference in Tucson also included a session on improvisation (I organized that one and can vouch that we sent in our proposal before learning that the same topic would be addressed in New York).
Master teacher Gerry Hess wrote about asking his students do creative representations of the conceptual framework for personal jurisdiction years ago (I stole his idea for a “class participation” option and built on it twice. By also asking them to integrate the pieces of civil procedure into a creative “big picture” project. And by giving an in class group work assignment to draw the “stream of commerce.”)
And, of course, interest in storytelling is high (perhaps a follow-up to the focus on narrative in the late 80’s and 90’s, including the LawStories series, and the Conferences on Storytelling.
I pondered the “why now” and “best practices?” questions when I saw the Journal of Legal Education scholarly article follow-up to the Open Source play presentation. http://kotplow.typepad.com/clinicians_with_not_enoug/2009/03/ssrn-.html.
Is the why just aging law professors? Always-were- creative types who now feel the confidence to be a little more “out there”? Others starting to develop that side of their brains late in life? Or another result of the tightening market for Ph.D’s and K-12 teachers in the 70’s that brought people into law who otherwise might have landed elsewhere?
As to “best practices” — presumably active learning necessarily means engaging both hemispheres of the brain. If we want to “Teach the Whole Class” (to crib the title of an excellent Institute for Law Teaching video), surely we need to teach to learning styles that include the kinesthetic — maybe manipulating play doh, as one of my married-with-children law students did for her personal jurisdiction conceptual framework? And good legal work and good teaching require some ability to improvise in response to new situations.
I’m curious how many other such efforts around play and improvisation I’ve missed. Am I right that these issues are “in the air”?
Filed under: Catalysts For Change, Teaching Methodology, Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | 2 Comments »
I have long believed that alumni will financially support law school programs that are designed to prepare students for practice. I also believe that such programs will give schools an advantage over peer institutions in recruiting students.
The experience at Washington & Lee supports my theses. After making a commitment to transform its third year into an experiential education format beginning this coming Fall, W&L received a $2 million gift from an alum to help support this initiative. The school also reports that “75 second-year students opted in to become the first class to go through the program. This is well more than half of the rising 3L class and exceeds our expected enrollment by roughly thirty students.”
To top off the good news, the school announced that it has hired experiential education guru (my words) Jim Moliterno, formerly of William and Mary, as W&L’s Vincent Bradford Professor of Law.
We should all wish for the success of the program at W&L and similarly bold moves at other schools. If they can demonstrate the educational superiority of their curriculums others will follow. And it won’t hurt to show strong support from alumni and potential students.
Filed under: Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | Comments Off on If You Build It, They Will Come
The latest issue of The Law Teacher is out– http://www.washburnlaw.edu/faculty/schwartz-michael-institute/15-2lawteacher(2009).pdf .
Several of the articles address topics near and dear to those of us interested in legal education reform. In particular, Harriet Katz’s “Personal Assessment” paper offers an exciting tool for building reflection skills that can be adapted to even the most doctrine-and-theory course you teach.
Barb Glesner Fines, the Law Teacher’s First “Guest Columnist” convincingly argues that improving law teaching remains critical even (and perhaps, especially) in tough economic times.
Corrie Lynn Rosen’s “Thoughts on Being New to Academic Support” offers this gem of an image of a law school class, “My classroom would be a forum where students could try on new, difficult, or otherwise missed ideas without fear of embarrassment . . . where students would make understanding their own learning process part of addressing the larger questions . . . ”
Steve Coughlan of Dalhousie Law School in Canada offers a wonderfully-crafted explanation of why he teaches.
We hope you find these and the other articles helpful and inspiring.
Filed under: Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | Comments Off on The Law Teacher
I’ve been musing on the subject of “gravitas” lately. Why?
Now, I’ve talked to Larry Marshall about this subject. He’s an amazing and thoughtful guy. And most of us would probably agree: if the one, or three, or five schools that produce most of the law teachers in the country radically change their curriculum and teaching methods in the next five years, we’ll see major transformation in other schools in another ten to fifteen years, if not less. So maybe that’s a sensible strategy.
At the same time, I’m not so comfortable with the “it’s all about the gravitas” approach. Maybe it’s because many people thought John Kerry had “gravitas” back in 2003. And lots of folks thought Barack Obama didn’t in 2008.
Maybe because so many of the innovators in teaching methods and curriculum in the last decade have come from schools that lack “hierarchy gravitas”, but felt compelled to help their students learn better.
And maybe it’s because I fear the potential (or reality) of transformative efforts being undermined by fractures along the gravitas axis. Of the “grav’s” wasting time reinventing wheels long since created and put on the vehicle by the un-grav’s. Of the ungravs getting discouraged because the gravs get all the glory for work that was initiated by the ungravs.
Tip o’ the hat to the un-grav’s for doing all the work in the trenches for all these years. Another tip o’ the hat to the grav’s for moving the transformation checker down the board with the LEARN initiative. And, please, all you gravs out there, keep working on inclusiveness and giving credit where it’s due.
Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Catalysts For Change, Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | Comments Off on On Change, Hierarchies, and Gravitas
The value of active, collaborative learning is a key “best practices” theme. And it overlaps with a major theme we heard from employer representatives in a series of listening sessions my law school held a few years ago. Public interest, government, firms — they all wanted our graduates to know how to work in teams and manage complex projects.
Law schools have traditionally given students few opportunities to work in teams. And even the few opportunities available –moot court or clinic partnerships– typically haven’t come with instruction on how to work well in teams. With the help of our wonderful reference staff — a shout out to Mary Whisner, just awarded the UW’s Distinguished Librarian award — I’ve been trolling for resources for instruction on teamwork. So thought I’d share a few finds:
MIT’s Teaching and Learning Laboratory has several useful handouts “developed for an undergraduate course in professional communication in which students work together in teams of three or four on semester-long projects.”
See http://web.mit.edu/tll/teaching-materials/teamwork/index.html
Working in teams is much more common in business schools and there’s a literature on it, including:
Hansen, Randall S.,Benefits and Problems With Student Teams: Suggestions for Improving Team Projects. Journal of Education for Business; Sep/Oct2006, Vol. 82 Issue 1, p11-19
Vik, Gretchen N., Doing More to Teach Teamwork Than Telling Students to Sink or Swim., Business Communication Quarterly, Vol. 6, Issue 4, pp. 112-119 , Dec. 2001
And, of course, it’s a big item in the business literature.
Polzer, Jeffrey T, Making Diverse Teams Click. Harvard Business Review; Jul-Aug2008, Vol. 86 Issue 7/8, p20-21
Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Teaching Methodology | 1 Comment »
Long-time Best Practices/Carnegie groupies or aficionados will note that one of other ongoing projects regarding legal education has been the research that Marjorie Shultz and Sheldon Zedeck of Berkeley have been conducting on what skills/qualities lawyers need. They presented an early version of their findings at an AALS annual meeting several years ago. Today (3-11-09), the NYT reported on their research. The article is available at Continue reading
Filed under: Best Practices & Curriculum, Catalysts For Change, First Year Law School Innovations | 1 Comment »
The postings from last weekend’s University of Maryland School of Law conference are great for those of us who were unable to attend. Some of us were at another conference last Thursday and Friday–Yale Law School’s celebration of Continue reading
Filed under: Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | Comments Off on So many conferences,so little time
(Continuing Report on U of Maryland’s 3/6 Conference)
The third panel presentation organically and beautifully modeled how to teach and communicate in accord with Best Practices. (I will post the webcast to the Events tab above as soon as I receive it so you can view the discussion and interaction).
First, CUNY Professor Sue Bryant led an interactive discussion Continue reading
Filed under: Technology, Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | 1 Comment »
Darlene Cardillo, instructional technologist at Albany Law School, sent me the link to her article entitled, The Use of Clickers in the Law School Classroom, which was recently published in THE LAW TEACHER (pp.13-14). http://blog.engaging-technologies.com/2009/02/cps-clickers-in-law-school-classroom.html
Darlene has written an excellent article about Professor Daniel Moriarty’s use of clickers in his 1L Criminal law class and how he incorporated clicker questions into his TWEN (The Westlaw Education Network) website. I found most interesting the results of the online survey she sent students asking them how the use of CPS enhanced their learning of the course material. You can see the responses that she gathered from students on her blog: http://albanylawtech.wordpress.com/2008/05/19/getting-ready-for-cali-conference-presentation/
She and Professor Moriarty presented at the University of Texas School of Law on “Using Clickers in the Law School” at the CALI Conference on June 19, 2008.
Filed under: Best Practices, Outcomes & Assessment Techniques, First Year Law School Innovations, Technology, Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | Comments Off on CPS Clickers in the Law School Classroom: A CRIM LAW EXPERIMENT
CURRICULAR IDEAS FROM HARVARD, NEW MEXICO AND STANFORD
The second panel of today’s UM conference focused on “Redevelopment of the Law School Curriculum.” Professors Antoinette Sedillo-Lopez, Todd Rakoff, and Larry Marshall described longstanding or new curricular ideas which meet at least some of the goals of Best Practices enthusiasts.
Larry Marshall began the session on the positive note that we’ve reached a moment where it is no longer the case that legal educators stand up at conferences and declare that the “best way to teach students” is to have students “repeatedly go to classes” over and over for three years in which they are taught by the Case Dialogue method and be assessed at the end of each course by a one-shot exam. Yet, he observes, THAT IS STILL THE DOMINANT METHOD FOR MANY CLASSES AT MANY SCHOOLS. That is why he urges all of us to engage in the kind of widespread curricular reform efforts encouraged in the LEARN report ( see my previous post ) which he describes as an exercise in incremental pragmatism. Continue reading
Filed under: Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | Comments Off on CURRICULAR IDEAS FROM HARVARD, NEW MEXICO AND STANFORD
March 5, 2009
To: Law School Deans & Associate Deans
From: Steering Committee of LEARN (Legal Education Analysis & Reform
Network)
Re: Outline of the Work that LEARN is Doing in Cooperation with the
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching Continue reading
Filed under: Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | Comments Off on BREAKING NEWS: LEARN Report Sent to all Deans
I type this post while listening to the Deans’ Panel presentation at the University of Maryland’s Conference – Curriculum Reform: Linking Theory and Practice. Three Law School Deans, reflecting on the evolving reform movement in Legal Education, describe Best Practices as a win-win for Deans and a force to be embraced and enjoyed. Continue reading
Filed under: Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | 1 Comment »
Yesterday, an active and caring member of our school’s Board of Trustees Long Range Planning Committee came to visit me to learn more about Best Practices and the legal education reform movement. His visit started me thinking about an untapped resource in this reform effort – Board Members. Continue reading
Filed under: Who is Using the Best Practices Book? | 2 Comments »
 | Jim Wheaton on The Economic Value of Law Clin… |
| Could a purpose defi… on Implementation of the ABA’s Ne… | |
 | Kaci Bishop on Teaching Students the Art of G… |
 | Anne Gordon (Duke La… on Teaching Students the Art of G… |
| Defining lawyer comp… on Racial Inequity on the Bar… |
Best Practices for Legal Education 