Idea One:
Videotaping Classes to Free Up Face to Face Time for Discussion
Necessity is the motherhood of invention. Recently a colleague, Heidi Holland, found herself in need of an inventive idea to help her make up a class she missed due to sickness. The class she needed to make up was teaching the students how to research in the Code of Federal Regulations. In the past, Heidi tried lecturing on it. Boring, she thought. She had also in the past tried taking the whole class (15 students) to the library and doing a hands-on activity. This proved to be too unwieldy with that many students. Her solution for the last couple of years had been to divide the class into small groups and take each small group through a hands-on lesson. This was working well until she had to miss class on Friday. Thus, she decided to videotape herself doing the research in the library with our IT person following her around the library with a camera.
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Idea Two:
Neil Hamilton, Effectiveness Requires Listening: How to Assess and Improve Listening Skills, 13 Florida Coastal Law Review 145 (2012)
In this article, Professor Neil Hamilton first reinforces the importance of listening skills for lawyers and then shows us how we can help our students develop theirs.
Empirical research . . . indicates that people whom others perceive as the most effective individuals have strong listening skills. . . . [T]he most influential individuals had a common ability to encourage others to talk openly about high-stakes, controversial, and emotional topics. These individuals found a way to get all the relevant information from others and themselves out in the open. [page 145; footnotes omitted.]
Summarizing the research about listening skills for lawyers, Hamilton refers to multiple studies that show how instrumental listening is in developing client relationships, working well with colleagues, and practicing many other lawyering tasks. For students who are more interested in speaking about the law than listening, this research may help persuade them that learning to listen well is important in law school and their future careers.
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