Several ideas this month and a few suggested articles from the Gonzaga Institute for Law Teaching and Learning:
1. Teaching Students to Work Effectively with Others
How ready are law students for the kinds of collaboration they will face when they practice law? The MacCrate Report, the 2008 study by Marjorie Shultz and Sheldon Zedeck (Predicting Lawyer Effectiveness: A New Assessment for Use in Law School Admission Decisions (2008) 36 Law & Social Inquiry 620 (2011) and recent interviews with practicing lawyers note the importance of collaboration. Whether working in large or small firms, non-profit organizations, businesses, or governmental entities, all attorneys spoke about the need for lawyers to listen effectively, be willing to admit ignorance, and work well with a wide range of people.
We can help our students develop interpersonal skills and prepare for their future careers by infusing our courses with collaborative experiences. We can also help them by explaining the importance of these skills to their future careers and giving them feedback on their interactions. In addition, we can build on the experiences many of our students are getting in college, where teamwork and collaboration are frequently emphasized. For example, one college career office tells students that a hot current interview question is "Tell us about a time when you were working on a team and you ran into a conflict." The best response would discuss the situation, explain the conflict, and show how the job applicant helped resolve the conflict in a positive way. The answer should take no more than two minutes, with at least half the time devoted to discussing the resolution. The resolution should include concrete outcomes such as, "We went on to raise $6,000." The interviewer should come away with the impression that the job applicant was an effective problem-solver, leader, and team player.
We can give our students practice collaborating in a variety of ways. A simple approach is using a one-minute "think-write-pair-share" where students think about a response to a question, make a few notes, and then share their response with one or two neighbors. All students get the chance to talk about their response and listen to a colleague. It's not a great deal of interpersonal skill building, but it's an improvement over none at all. A more elaborate strategy is to use team-based learning for one or more course modules, where students work in teams to solve problems and complete tests and projects. (More on team-based learning in law can be found at http://lawteaching.org/teaching/teambasedlearning/). Between a one-minute pair exercise and team-based learning lie a number of collaborative exercises that, if well designed, can help our students develop effective interpersonal skills.
Every semester a number of students resist collaborative work, stating that they are in school to learn the law, "not some touchy-feely stuff," like interpersonal skills. We can respond that we have a bigger responsibility, teaching them to be lawyers, which includes working well with others. Explaining the reasons for collaborative work doesn't end all complaints, but it does let them know that we are trying to prepare them to succeed professionally.
2. NIKE COMMERCIALS AND GOOD TEACHING: Just Do It!
My recent trip to the Republic Of Georgia with Michael Schwartz catalyzed the precipitation of formerly disjointed thoughts into this tangible comparison of an athletic shoe sales pitch to good teaching. While there, we presented on teaching methods and assessment to the most vibrant, devoted group of young legal academics I have ever had the pleasure of meeting.
Briefly, these law professors in the emerging former Soviet republic are driven to become excellent teachers preparing their students for the effective practice of law. This despite the fact most of them were paid the equivalent of approximately $300 U.S. dollars per semester for teaching at the law schools. Law school was therefore not their main source of income; they also had demanding and successful law practices in Georgia and internationally.
Yet, for the most part, they voluntarily attended these training sessions, actively participated in workshops, and took significant time away from their bread and butter careers because they were so driven to become better teachers. This is especially remarkable because it was the second time within one year that they sat through a four day, five hour per day presentation on teaching methods.
The reason for their devotion had to do with a strong emerging sense of nationalism, part of which included the idea that the younger generation would not be hindered by what they considered an inferior and insular Soviet education model.
The reviled Soviet model taught doctrine and considered legal education an academic transfer of knowledge which this generation considers ill-suited for the effective practice of law. As part of that effort to reform legal education, a USAID grant facilitated my trip to Georgia.
What I found ironic is the young professors' unanimous worry that those still employed Soviet-era pure academics would shrug off all the modern approaches to teaching which involve providing assessment, feedback, teaching with tangible outcomes in mind, and applying modern learning theory as a dumbing down of legal education. The familiar refrain from the old guard was that legal education in Georgia was all about teaching lawyers to "think like lawyers."
Surprisingly this is the same response that typically comes from established U.S. academics when efforts to reform legal education in the United States are considered, even when those efforts are based on studies such as Carnegie and Best Practices which incorporate modern learning theory. Erwin Chemerinsky, a much more respected scholar and academic than I could ever be, recently stated at a conference on law school construction that only law professors get away with the justification that our job is to teach people to think like lawyers rather than to be lawyers, which Carnegie and Best Practices advocate. Chemerinsky jokingly asked the rhetorical question: "How would you feel just as you were going under the anesthetic if your brain surgeon said, 'Don't worry they taught me how to think like a doctor in medical school?'"
My initial response to the young Georgians' concerns was that the old guard was looking for an excuse to not have to do things differently than they had for many years. Class prep for these Soviet era educators involved pulling out 15 year old notes, asking the same questions and discussing doctrine they could discuss in their sleep by now. Total teaching prep time was therefore little more than the actual class time, required very little effort and left time for many other attempts to improve professional status and respect among their peers.
I think the time has come to decide if legal educators are teachers. If we are teachers, then there are many studies and reports that describe what good teaching is. Part of our job as teachers is to make sure that we do not conveniently rely on pedagogical methods suggested in the late 1800s, but rather make the effort to consider modern pedagogical theory and incorporate it into our class room time.
All the modern education studies absolutely mention the need for reality based instruction, the need for feedback, and for multimodal presentation of materials. All of these things require inordinately more prep time and thought about classroom presentation than is currently considered normatively acceptable.
I asked Erwin Chemerinsky how he could realistically expect Professors to incorporate feedback, assessment, and other labor intensive teaching recommendations yet still have time for scholarship. His response, as everything Chemerinsky, was brilliant and brief, "That's what summers are for."
I do not have the answer but after Georgia we should at least honestly ask ourselves a question: is U.S. resistance to Carnegie, Best Practices and the ABA outcomes based education model really anything more than hesitance to "just do it," because just doing it involves a lot more time and effort than we currently devote to class time?
3. First Article of the Month:
Robin Wellford Slocum, Educating Students About the Emotional Factors that Can Undermine Their Analytical Thinking, Legal Reasoning, Writing, & Other Lawyering Skills (3rd ed., 2011).
This review stems from two articles written by Robin Wellford Slocum of Chapman University School of Law. The first, "Educating Students About the Emotional Factors that Can Undermine Their Analytical Thinking," is published in Legal Reasoning, Writing, & Other Lawyering Skills, Chapter 4, 3rd ed. (LexisNexis, 2011). The second is "An Inconvenient Truth: The Need to Educate Emotionally Competent Lawyers," available on SSRN.
Both the chapter and the article deal with the same issue, that of teaching emotional competency. These two scholarly works describe the process of teaching our students to "think like an emotionally competent lawyer[s]," which includes understanding the emotional brain and the thinking brain and their interconnectedness. Slocum emphasizes how the emotional brain oversimplifies the world (black/white; right/wrong; etc.). The emotional brain also discounts evidence that one's initial instincts may be wrong while over-emphasizing evidence that proves one's initial instinct was correct. In this way, the emotional brain tends to highjack the thinking brain. This myopic lens, if left unexamined and unchecked, can lead to inaccurate legal conclusions based on a limited world view. This lack of perspective and judgment can make accurate evaluation of the law and client needs difficult.
To read more of this review and to access the full text of the article, please go to
http://lawteaching.org/articles/index.php
4. Second Article of the Month
Barbara Glesner Fines, Lessons Learned about Classroom Teaching from Authoring CALI Lessons, 38 William Mitchell Law Review 1094 (2012).
Barbara Glesner Fines is a leading voice in the field of law school teaching and learning, including computer-assisted legal instruction. Consistent with her other scholarship on teaching and learning, this article is clear, concise, and insightful. In this article, she draws five important lessons for law teaching from her experience as an author and editor of CALI lessons.
1. Good Teaching is Good Scholarship. Writing a law review article, authoring a CALI lesson, and preparing for classroom teaching all benefit from the same process - thorough research, careful analysis, and peer review.
2. Choosing a Destination is Half the Battle. Clear learning objectives for students are a fundamental aspect of good teaching. These questions can help teachers identify objectives for a CALI lesson or classroom session:
* Where in the students' learning does this lesson come? Is this lesson primarily for background instruction, enrichment, or review?
* How deep into the doctrine should the lesson delve? How many exceptions to the general rule are necessary or helpful? How many examples?
* What level of proficiency does the lesson expect?
* From what standpoint is the student learning? As a policymaker? A lawyer practicing in a particular setting?
To read the rest of the lessons and more, please go to http://lawteaching.org/articles/index.php
5. The Three Most Time-Efficient Teaching Practices
A recent study (Bentley & Kyvik, 2012) found that faculty in the United States spend on average over 50 hours per week on the job, and of those hours, over 20 are spent in teaching activities. These hours can be much higher for faculty at certain stages of their career or at certain kinds of institutions, but regardless, we spend a lot of time at our work. But more isn?t necessarily better?we don?t measure productivity in academia in terms of hours logged. What are we gaining by the time spent? And are we finding the time we spend meaningful and rewarding?
What constitutes productivity in teaching is a point of debate, of course, but many of us agree that we want to facilitate student learning. When faculty are challenged to change traditional teaching practices to promote better student success, all we may see looming before us is additional class preparation time. The best kept secret, however, is how much more time-efficient some of these touted teaching practices are. Below I discuss three of these best practices and the positive impact they can have on the way we spend our time teaching.
Begin with the end in mind.
The principle of backward course design (Wiggins & McTighe, 1998) echoes one of the late Stephen Covey?s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (1989). In this model, course design begins by determining what it is that we really want students to be able to do or feel or think long after the final exam is over. Then we make every other aspect of the course serve those goals. Once we have articulated our goals, whether lofty or pragmatic, our next step is to determine how students will demonstrate to us that they have indeed achieved the kind of learning we want of them (assessment). Lastly we turn our attention to the class format and activities that would facilitate that achievement. Aligning these three facets of course design (goals, assessments, and activities) builds in a coherence and synergy in the course that creates greater opportunities for students to learn what we want them to learn.
Clear course goals that communicate the nature of our disciplinary work to students tend to take the form of ?At the end of this course students will be able to: explain concepts such as?, develop a thesis (or hypothesis), analyze data (or texts or images), contrast points of view on issues, or write cogent arguments based on research (or analysis).? We may assess students? achievement of these goals through exam questions, papers, or projects, checking that the level of thought or skill that we want students to gain is represented in those assessments. Key to alignment, however, is making sure that we give students opportunities on lower stakes assignments or during class activities to practice the same skills we want them to ultimately demonstrate on our assessments.
The backward design approach helps focus our course efforts, not only generating better chances for students to learn what we want them to learn, but also saving class preparation time in at least three ways. First, we spend less time deciding what readings and assignments to include in our course because we now have targeted criteria to use to make that determination?our course goals. Second, we design our assignments around those course goals, so we spend less time grading or responding to assignments that don?t accomplish what we had hoped and are, in essence, busy work for our students and for us. And third, we are more apt to restrain ourselves from taking on too much in the course. Articulating our goals rather than masking them in a generalized descriptive statement (e.g., ?In this course we will discuss the effect of global economics on world trade?) helps us see more clearly the demands we are placing on the novice learners in our disciplines.
Generate criteria or rubrics to describe disciplinary work for students.
Once we have clear course goals we can use them to generate criteria or rubrics, a time-efficient approach to grading. We faculty know what quality student work is when we see it?but our students do not. Disciplinary work is a mystery for students. As faculty we may have forgotten what it was like to be a novice learner in our field (a phenomenon known as expert blind spot), or we may have been more intuitive about these processes even as students. In all likelihood, we faculty were not representative of the other students in classes with us at the time. We are a self-selected group that shares little in common with the vast and diverse array of contemporary students. Providing students with criteria or rubrics gives them a glimpse into the way that we think.
Sharing with students the criteria that we will use to evaluate their work both models disciplinary thinking for them and helps them develop the ability to evaluate their own work. Although we may think that these kinds of guides ?give it away? and make our assignments too easy for students, rarely is this the case. Instead these sets of criteria or rubrics can be a motivator for students. They make the assignment less of a mystery and make the students? own success seemingly more under their control. For examples of rubrics in many disciplines see Walvoord & Anderson, 2010 (pp. 195-232).
Using criteria or rubrics to grade student work saves time by: helping students produce better quality work (and better quality work is both faster and more pleasurable to grade); allowing us to assign points more quickly and consistently as we grade; and providing clear criteria for us to use in talking to students about their grades. When a student comes to appeal a grade, we can ask her to explain how the work meets the criteria. So the session becomes less about faculty defending their judgment, and more about helping the student learn to evaluate work from a disciplinary perspective. Although it does take time to generate really useful sets of criteria or rubrics, we can use them over and over and adapt them to multiple purposes.
Embed ?assessment? into assessments.
Generating criteria for student work also serves another purpose that is time-efficient?it helps us in our assessment of student learning outcomes for institutional purposes. Although assessment of student learning in terms of assignments, tests, and papers is second nature to faculty, ?assessment? in the sense of tracking student learning outcomes is often considered a four-letter word. In reality, determining precisely what students are learning in our classes focuses our scholarly minds on our teaching. Just as we look for evidence to make arguments for our theses or hypotheses in our discipline, when we assess student learning outcomes we determine if our courses are accomplishing what we planned in terms of student learning. Based on what we learn, we can change our courses to make them more efficient in producing the outcomes we want.
Assessment processes have been criticized for consuming time without producing results. Because data collection often occurred at levels at the institution beyond the course (or possibly even department) level, it seemed removed from day-to-day course activities and needs (Hutchings, 2010). Some of the most meaningful assessment, however, is data that we as faculty collect about what activities engage students most productively, what concepts and skills students find most challenging, and what interventions advance student progress. The key to making the assessment requirement work for us is to embed our assessment of student learning outcomes into regular class assignments, exams, papers, and activities.
Faculty are accustomed to assessing student work with a grade. When we think about student learning, however, a grade represents a composite accounting of all the knowledge and skills we ask students to demonstrate on a piece of work. Assessing student learning outcomes requires us to deconstruct or unpack what that grade represents. What specific kinds of knowledge and skills did students demonstrate on a graded piece of work? For example, if our goal is to develop students? critical reasoning abilities in our discipline, we may record the level of students? performance on certain test questions that are specifically directed at that goal. These questions may be multiple choice or short answer, in which case we keep track of correct student responses. Or we can examine students? performance on an essay using criteria (or a rubric) that capture the elements of critical analysis that we want students to demonstrate (see above). We then keep track of students? rubric scores to
determine what aspects of analysis they have mastered and what aspects they need to improve.
The information gained from monitoring students? performance makes our teaching more time-efficient by directing our choices on class activities and assignments. For example, rather than lecturing on all aspects of course material, we focus class activities on those areas that students find most challenging. Likewise, we spend our preparation time designing and responding to assignments that are targeted more directly at developing key skills in students. The time we spend is more likely to produce the kind of learning we want in students.
Summary
Redesigning our teaching based on recognized effective teaching approaches does require an investment of time upfront. But that investment pays off every day, all year long. And our time is often spent in more intellectually satisfying interactions with students, increasing our sense of productivity, and making the time more meaningful and rewarding.
References
Bentley, P.J., and S. Kyvik, S. 2012. ?Academic Work from a Comparative Perspective: A Survey of Faculty Working Time across 13 Countries.? Higher Education, 63: 529-547.
Covey, S. 1989. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.
Hutchings, P. April, 2010. Opening Doors to Faculty Involvement in Assessment. National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment Occasional Paper #4. Retrieved from http://www.learningoutcomesassessment.org
Walvoord, B., and V. J. Anderson. 2010. Effective Grading (2nd ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Wiggins, G., and J. McTighe. 1998. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
CONTACT:
Linda C. Hodges
Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs
Director, Faculty Development Center
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
1000 Hilltop Circle
Baltimore, MD 21250
E-mail: lhodges@umbc.edu