Is Mandatory P/F An Opportunity to More Accurately Assess Competency to Practice Law and For Bar Admission?

Posted on March 29, 2020 by Mary A. Lynch

As our knowledge of COVID19 and its impact becomes more extensive each day, each workplace, profession and community is facing some common and some unique questions. Those working on the front lines in hospitals – such as several of  my relatives in NYC and NJ – are experiencing the kind of trauma, shortages, emotional overload and duress that is usually experienced in wartime. It can only be weakly imagined by the rest of us.   For those of us not experiencing  people suffering and dying in front of us on a daily basis, some less horrific choices are before us:  How do we modify “business as usual”?  How do we evolve and adapt with each days new tsunmai of information and data?  How do we support our best selves and our core values in this historically momentous time on our shared planet? 

Before turning to the topic of grading and assessment, I want to pause to give a shout-out to my home institution. Our multi-talented leader Dean Alicia Ouellette has been holding  community town halls every day since Friday March 20th. (BTW Dean Ouellette  just shared on Facebook  that she had been suffering from “presumptive COVID 19” fever and symptoms but thankfully is now symptom free). During our daily town halls, my faculty colleagues and I have expressed our wonder and gratitude for the  character, resilience and grit of our law students who are balancing so much right now, and facing so many financial, tech-related, health and extended family burdens. Our students’ engaged and forgiving response to “tech-curious but not necessarily tech-savvy” teachers and their community-minded empathy for those hardest hit keeps the faculty motivated and inspired.

One of the COVID19 decisions for legal educators involves whether and how we assess and sort — which in reductive  vernacular means “grade and rank.”  Maintaining appropriate expectations, options, rigor and excellence in law teaching  may assume primacy for those  who have been long focused on ensuring that law students receive real value for the time, talent and treasure they expend on law school.   For others focused on fairness in law placement,  transparent employer signals about how they will view Spring 2020 legal education may be most influential.  For those concerned about our profession’s  reputation for lack of wellness and lack of diversity, those concerns are elevated at this moment when those least advantaged are most hard pressed.  For those struggling with equity, there are so many permutations and consequences of COVID19 – whichever choice a school makes – that voting faculty could become as immobilized as Chidi Anagonye on THE GOOD PLACE. (BTW Good idea for escape television for those who love philosophy or Kristen Bell).

On the other hand, might this be a moment to look for the opportunities for reform and improvement that only come when the status quo is disturbed and rocked to its foundations as is happening now.  Here is what I am thinking:

Might Mandatory P/F force educators and employers to admit that traditional law school grading and ranking is a misleading and reductive proxy for measuring potential success as a lawyer?

Could it force employers to use other ways to learn about the WHOLE STUDENT with all her strengths, gaps, and individual aptitudes including the situation she faced during law school?

Might it accelerate a move to a more qualitative than quantitative assessment of each law student? Or, at least might it prioritize learning which enables a school to assemble a portfolio of student recommendations ( demonstration of knowledge, skills, aptitudes, and professionalism)?

Foundational resources include of course Educating Lawyers, Best Practices in Legal Education, and Building on Best Practices: Transforming Legal Education in a Changing World, which also provide helpful wisdom points. In addition, looking back through the dozen or so years of this blog’s existence, there are lessons from which we can pull core knowledge and core values to assist in our continued educational deliberations at this turbulent time. 

CORE KNOWLEDGE AND REFLECTIONS

Valuing Legal Education over Sorting – For example, focus on the difference between assessment and grading.  Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers conferences have brought employers, law schools, and legal education stakeholders together to tackle the disconnect between our current sorting systems (primarily used to help elite employers looking for a simple and reductive initial screening system) and the needs of society and most employers for competent new attorneys and the needs of students and the profession for fairness.

Focus instead on formative and evaluative assessment of law students and graduates

Focus on growth mindset, on reflection and learning from mistakes or experience

Recognize the limits and problems with GPA’s or LSAT scores to create a more competent profession with more able and diverse learners.

Acknowledge that the media and the academy is still stuck in a mindset that focuses on sorting methods rather than on better preparation and assessment of law students to serve clients and society.

Class rank does not predict who will become a competent, healthy and ethical lawyer

Effective Education includes

CORE LEARNING VALUES

Growth Mindset 

Inclusion and Diversity

Student-centered Learning  and the Introduction to the original Best Practices – “One of our basic tenets is that law schools should become more student-centered”

Wellness  

Collaboration and Innovation

Integrity 

Character 

Justice

Situational Excellence

There is a common theme here: P/F with alternative assessment information and measures should be seen not as temporary emergency expedients to “sort and rank”, but rather as long overdue components of a better educational program and more nuanced assessment paradigm.

I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.  I wish all our readers and citizens of our little blue planet moments of peace, love, safety, and compassion. May someone be kind to you today and let’s pay it forward.

 

 

 

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Building an Ethos of Self-Directedness Among First-Year Law Students

Posted on October 15, 2019 by Jessica N. Haller

By: Mary Walsh Fitzpatrick, Assistant Dean for the Career and Professional Development Center at Albany Law School

Background

I attended a workshop on professional identity formation sponsored by the Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions last June. In preparation for the workshop, I read a number of articles on professional identity formation, including “Self-Directedness and Professional Formation: Connecting Two Critical Concepts in Legal Education.” The article posits “[f]or law students to move towards real professional identity formation in their career, they must be self-directed.” Self-directedness, some of the hallmarks of which are self-reflection, goal setting, seeking and receiving feedback, and using sound judgment, is integral to finding meaningful employment and career satisfaction. I know from first-hand experience working within law school career development for the past 13 years, students who are most successful in gaining meaningful employment take ownership of their experiences and make intentional choices early in law school. I believe self-directedness more than any other factor, including grades, leads to meaningful careers for law school graduates. The challenge is to cultivate self-directedness in all law students by creating an ethos of self-directedness with regard to career development beginning in the first year.     

While at the Holloran Center workshop, I devised a career development program to introduce first-year students to professional identity formation with emphasis on self-directedness. I subsequently shared the proposed program with my team at the Albany Law School Career and Professional Development Center and we collaborated on the program presentation and exercises. At Albany Law School, students are assigned an individual career counselor with whom they work one-on-one over the entire course of law school. Thus, in planning and implementing the program my colleagues and I chose to each lead the program for our sections separately, beginning individual relationships with our students and setting expectations.     

We decided upon a method of teaching that would allow students to practice self-reflection, seeking and receiving feedback, and using good judgment in the context of career development. The overarching goal of the program was to help students recognize self-directedness as a key component for successful professional identity formation leading to meaningful careers.

The Program – Setting the Stage

We communicated the program as a mandatory one-hour program and emailed to first-year students several weeks before the program the Individual Career Plan (ICP), a self-assessment tool we created several years ago, and our handbook for developing a legal resume. The students were asked to complete their ICPs and draft their legal resumes in preparation for the program. 

  • Reflection

We began the program by introducing professional identity formation and self-directed learning, emphasizing curiosity, initiative, feedback, self-reflection, resilience, judgment and ethics. We provided students with the Holloran Competency Milestones Assessment of Student’s Ownership of Continuous Professional Development (Self-Directedness) and asked them to take a moment to reflect upon and identify their current stage of development on the continuum. Recognizing each student comes to law school at a different stage of self-directedness we did not ask students to share their findings with the group, rather we called attention to law school providing students with the opportunity to move along the continuum with the goal of graduating competent learners who take full ownership over their careers by setting goals and seeking resources to meet those goals.

Next, we asked students to form small groups and to reflect upon and share with each other why they chose to attend law school, skills they hope to build, and experiences they hope to gain during law school. After this breakout session we asked one student from each group to report back some of the group’s findings. Two distinct motivations for attending law school emerged from this exercise, students: wanting to utilize existing strengths they identify as befitting a legal career; and wanting to acquire the skills necessary to be catalysts for change. Notably, both motivations evidence students’ strong desire to align their skills and values with meaningful employment.

  • Seeking and Receiving Feedback

In the second portion of the program we focused on seeking and receiving feedback in the context of career development. We began by educating students on critical thinking skills sought by legal employers, such as analyzing, evaluating, reasoning, and problem solving. We then asked students to provide peer-to-peer feedback on their resumes utilizing the resume handbook we provided before the program and tools we discussed during the program. Students worked in couples or groups of three to seek and provide each other with constructive feedback on how to better formulate existing resume descriptions for a legal audience. After the exercise we asked students to contribute one piece of valuable feedback they received.    

  • Judgment

In the final portion of the program students were divided into groups and provided three different hypotheticals related to career development decisions. Each group was asked to analyze the issues and report back how they would address the situation presented. The hypotheticals included issues of reneging on a job offer, misrepresenting grade point average on a resume, and failing to follow up with a professional connection. Through dialogue following the exercise we emphasized the importance of reputation, impact of reputational damage, building professional relationships, and the imperative of follow-through.  Many students acknowledged although no single hypothetical scenario would necessarily determine success in finding meaningful employment, the decisions made with regard to these issues could impact one’s professional reputation and future opportunities.   

Conclusion

We hope to have initiated student appreciation for the impact of self-directedness on professional identity formation that is integral to beginning meaningful careers after law school. The next step is for each student to take the initiative to complete an online strengths assessment, the VIA Character Strengths Survey, make a first career counseling appointment where they will receive individualized feedback on the ICP and legal resume and identify next steps in planning their careers.  

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