ABA Council Meeting — Final Vote on Accred Standards

Posted on August 10, 2013 by Michele Pistone

Here is the final recap of yesterday’s vote by ABA Council on accreditation standards:

The most significant of the proposed changes would involve job protections for full-time faculty members. The council, following a lengthy debate, voted to send out two alternatives to the current standard, which is widely understood to require tenure or a comparable form of security of position for all full-time faculty members, except for clinical professors and legal writing instructors.

The first alternative, favored by a narrow plurality of council members, would require law schools to provide some form of security of position (short of tenure) to all full-time faculty members, including clinical professors and legal writing instructors. The other, which was a close second, would not require any form of security of position for anybody, but would require law schools to have policies and procedures in place to attract and retain a competent full-time faculty and to protect academic freedom.

Following the notice and comment period, the council plans to choose one of the two alternatives–or a variation–for final approval. It has also agreed to postpone final approval of any changes in the standards until the standards review committee completes its proposed overhaul of the standards.

Other tentative changes approved by the council Friday would increase the experiential learning requirement in the standards from one credit hour to six credit hours; increase the amount of credits law students may receive from distance learning courses from 12 to 15; and eliminate the current requirement that the student/faculty ratio be considered in determining whether a school is in compliance with the standards.

taken from this ABA article: http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/legal_ed_section_council_advances_three_more_chapters_of_proposed_changes_i/

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ABA Council Meeting — up to minute updates

Posted on August 9, 2013 by Michele Pistone

As you know, the ABA Council is meeting today in San Fran to discuss the accreditation standards.  If you want up to the minute reporting, Dean Paul McGreal, from Dayton, is tweeting on it and also providing more detailed commentary on the LinkedIn group:  Legal Education and Law Schools.  

 
By the way, it sounds like Section 3 (The Program of Legal Education) is on the agenda for this afternoon.  Kate Kruse should be presenting comments on behalf of CLEA later today as well.

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Why Formative Assessment is Essential in Legal Education

Posted on August 8, 2013 by Michele Pistone

As the ABA Council meets to consider and debate the proposed revisions to the Accreditation Standards found in section 3, The Program of Legal Education, I want to highlight a Forbes article by Michael Horn of the Clayton Christensen Institute.  Horn has been studying disruption in education for the last several years.  

If we take as a given that our goal in educating potential lawyers is for every single one of our graduates to have mastered the material before graduation, then a system that incorporates formative assessment and feedback is essential.  That’s because our current system of feedback and assessment does not ensure that students will be motivated to achieve mastery.  Why?  According to Horn, “the keys events embedded within curricula that could help students feel successful – examinations – occur [at the end of the semester].  Students generally don’t receive feedback on how they did for another couple weeks while the professor grades them.  And when the grades are handed out, the privilege of feeling successful is reserved only for the best students.  By design the rest experience failure.”  

But, according to the “Jobs To Be Done” theory that Clayton Christensen and Horn posit, law students hire law schools in part to make them feel successful and make meaningful progress.  How can our system of assessment be so out of line with what students hire us to do?

The article is definitely worth reading and explains why I envision blending online learning with active, problem-based, face-to-face instruction as a means to build motivation and thrive for mastery in learning for all our students.

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