Law School Innovation

Dungeons & Lawyers: legal simulations and the art of game-mastering

part 1: What’s a legal simulation?

If Paul Maharg has his way, American law professors may soon have as much in common with the game referees in World of Warcraft than Prof. Kingsfield from The Paper Chase. Maharg, author of Transforming Legal Education, is working with CALI to distribute and support software that enables legal educators to run legal practice simulations. SIMPLE (SIMulated Professional Legal Education) provides a framework for students to engage in transactions typical of real-life legal practice, providing the kind of contextualized knowledge and skill that the Carnegie Study and others have demanded.

I will leave to the Carnegie Foundation, Maharg’s own writing, and countless other pieces in educational psychology and the learning sciences to explain why context-rich simulation is so effective at teaching knowledge, skills, and values. Let’s assume that, as an instructor, you’re ready to take the leap into simulation-based learning. What is this pedagogy like? What will you need to do to get started?

The virtual worlds that SIMPLE conjures may lack the special effects of World of Warcraft, but they, too, offer twisting plots, colorful characters, and devious puzzles. Students become protagonists who grow in strength by overcoming challenges. Non-Player Characters (“NPCs”) present most of these challenges, whether as the client in need of rescue or the witnesses guarding precious evidence. Fictional websites provide a virtual landscape for the students to explore in order to build their cases. And battle is joined not with the clash of swords but the exchange of documents. All of this might make for a poor adventure film, but it can add up to a believable, even exciting, legal conflict.

Here’s an example:

Students enter the simulation as associates of the firm Kerrigan, Burns & Robertson. KB&R has been retained to represent a company that is being sued for a slip-and-fall that occurred on its property, located in the fictional town of Ardalloch, Scotland. (Another team of students play associates of the firm representing the plaintiff). The students-cum-associates watch a video of the initial client interview and receive, via SIMPLE’s simulated email system, a memo from their supervising partners outlining their role in the case.

Students then engage in both informal and formal discovery, wandering through Ardcalloch via the town’s online directory listing and virtual map (think fictional Yahoo directory and Mapquest pages). They might, for example, contact the local landscaper responsible for maintaining the area where the fall took place; within a few hours or days, they should (if they made a well-formulated request) get a witness statement. (Behind the scenes, what’s really happening is that the students send a SIMPLE message to the simulation staff, who assume the role of the landscaper and respond to the request in a manner consistent with the landscaper’s version of the facts and with the character’s personality).

As the team builds their evidentiary case, they revise their overall strategy. For example, the team might uncover new data that contradict the client’s initial statement of facts, forcing further discussion with the client and perhaps a revision of the overall theory of the case. At some point the two teams meet and negotiate a settlement (court action falls outside the scope of the simulation). The teams then step out of role and review their own performance and learning.

No goblins, no dragons, no magic, and yet this is a bona fide virtual world, one rich with performance-oriented learning experiences for law students. Law professors won’t need to learn to animate 3D monsters – but they’ll certainly need a different set of skills than mesmerizing students with brilliant lectures. They might instead benefit from studying how video games scaffold immersive, effective learning. I’ll take up that topic in the next part of this series.

- Gene Koo

Student survey on laptops in the classroom, legal writing and other LSI topics of note

A new piece from The Chronicle of Higher Education, headlined "Survey Gets Law-School Students' Thoughts on Laptops, Writing, and Ethics," covers a lot of topics that often garner our attention here at LSI.  Here are a few snippets from this article:

Law-school professors are fed up with students using laptop computers in class to surf to Facebook, eBay, everything but LexisNexis. And some have even banned the distracting machines.  But results from a new survey show that an outright ban might not be such a good idea.

The 2008 Law School Survey of Student Engagement, released today, suggests that, when used wisely, laptops can actually enhance student engagement.  The survey found that class-related laptop use correlates highly with reported gains in several areas, including critical and analytical thinking.

Students who used laptops for class-related activities, like reading case briefs or taking notes, were more likely than students using laptops during class for other purposes to be engaged in classroom discussions, synthesize concepts from different courses, and work hard to meet faculty expectations, the survey found....

This year's survey gathered responses from 29,000 students at 85 law schools, up from 79 schools last year. The data were collected in a brief Web-based questionnaire that had a response rate of 53 percent.

The survey results show that most students receive opportunities to practice legal writing, a pillar of the law-school curriculum. Nearly 85 percent write at least one medium-length paper during the academic year, the survey report says, and 70 percent write at least one paper of 20 pages or more.  But more than a third of students still reported that they would like more time to practice writing, which surprised the researchers.  Such a finding, they say, shows the importance of soliciting student feedback.

"Legal education is behind most other professions in terms of having information about the student experience," said George D. Kuh, a professor of higher education at Bloomington and director of the survey.  "It is steeped in tradition, which in and of itself isn't a bad thing, but that tradition did not take into account or even consider student reports of what happened to them."

All the details of the 2008 Law School Survey of Student Engagement can be found at this site.  Available there is this official press release, which provides more highlights from the survey.  That press release includes this account of these notable findings from the 2008 LSSSE:

• More than a third of all law students wanted more opportunities to do practice-based legal writing during law school.

• Students pointed to clinics and professional responsibility courses as the most effective settings for learning legal ethics.

Posted by DAB

Liveblogging the Future of the Law School Casebook workshop part 2

Part 2, moderated by David Skover, is "The Printed Casebook & Its Print/Electronic Alternatives: advantages & disadvantages in content & delivery systems." We broke into four groups loosely discussing these topics without any formal structure. Summary notes of each groups reportback follows the jump...

First group: Is every change positive? How is the Bar driving how schools teach? Disagreement between preparing for the Bar vs. other teaching goals. How do you handle assessment tools? What are the forces driving innovation -- probably it's convenience, not pricing. Don't dichotomize between print and electronic -- it's a continuum.

Second group: What's wrong with the casebook? Lacks flexibility, customizability, doesn't take advantage of new media. What will it look like? Probably not a purely open database because newer professors want some structure -- more a set of modules that would represent a course. What role does the publishing industry have in this future? Creation, marketing, distribution?

Third group: Books are just a modality -- form of what we're creating (books) isn't intrinsic but a practicality. Impediments -- law schools' reward structure not geared towards creativity of teaching.

Fourth group: "Flexibility" -- how to give teachers maximum flexibility for designing, using content in the classroom. Would require a production team, law profs, technologists, instructional designers. How to disaggregate to obtain optimal granularity: (1) instructional design -- should correlate to learning objectives; (2) authoring systems -- should be separate from the delivery system, allowing multi-channel distribution; (3) delivery system -- make it optimal for class, or even individual students; (4) business model -- preference for open source but accommodating of commercial units, a payment model that would be consistent between the two.

Subsequent discussion points:

• Print lacks inherent value as a delivery mechanism? Distinguish between the entire value chain of print vs. final print product. Non-flexibility has some value for certainty of who's writing what.
• Is there a difference between electronic & print "thinking"? Some research suggests that the gap in cognitive absorption of learning between e & p is shrinking (see Bill Hill's research at Microsoft; see John Palfrey's Born Digital; see MacArthur's recent series).
• Generativity and interoperativity (on open standards) as watchwords of PLATFORMS moving forward.
• Is the digital / media evolution of practice going to change teaching with it?
• Bar exam driving law school pedagogy: might be an opportunity to teach differently. This is generating significant discussion.

Official notes for session 2

Liveblogging the Future of the Law School Casebook workshop part 1

I'm here at Seattle University School of Law with many esteemed law professors, publishers, and technology companies to discuss: where is the law school casebook headed in the near future?

Dean Kellye Testy is moderating our first conversation, "Glimpses of the Future: the possible, the probable, and the potential of innovative reform." This is an open discussion -- details after the break.

• David Scover describes himself "weaning away" from the Socratic method -- something that may have been rooted in a certain reliance on control.
• David Vladeck, as someone steeped in practice, emphasizes problem-based learning -- which existing case-oriented materials don't support.
• Ron Collins notes that a common theme that's emerged from the pre-workshop memos is "collaborative" -- that while Langdell implied a top-down, individualistic method, the big question moving forward is how to network people together.
• Kraig Baker, also as a practitioner, describes his own passion for law and how casebooks tend to quench that passion -- instead we need to find out how to feed that passion.
• Ed Rubin notes that new / emerging courses require new materials; otherwise, teachers won't adopt the courses. Furthermore, pedagogically we no longer understand skills as separate from doctrine, but rather the way we come to understand doctrine -- implying an interactive format.
• Dennis Patterson describes the innovation of the "intervention" -- breaking into cases to ask students about the opinion as it unfolds. But West's system could not handle publishing this electronically. For a problem in commercial transactions, he wants to see video & schematics describing an actual industry / transaction in context -- and most importantly, be able to deploy imagination to apply doctrine.
• Michael Schwartz cites Prof. Oates' research that most successful students learn from cases with a problem in mind -- and therefore, what real data should we keep in mind, moving forward.
• Paula Lustbader wants students to think about why are you thinking this -- what did you do to figure it out, so you can replicate it. We need a combination of text and real-life experiences, even interview real clients -- not for every case, but thoughtfully about how stories can make learning more rich. Materials should model the expert protocol and WHY is the lawyer asking this question, what's the approach to problem-solving. As for imagination: there's a need for students to PLAY with the materials, not putting them into boxes.
• John Mayer discusses how so much technology is available, but points out that the problem has been professors creating one-offs rather than collaborating, and furthermore, why not consider students as collaborators too, to help create a/v resources.
• John Palfrey -- reconceptualizing materials as born digital to begin with, and reprovision them for different needs, rather than putting things into Langdellian buckets. And students, too, are born digital and therefore thinking differently -- sometimes a strength, sometimes a weakness.
• Conrad Johnson -- what's often missing is the context, law from the ground up -- you can ask your students what they want to know, so you can catch the kinds of things that we overlook in the Socratic method.
• Bill Harmon -- students are already very proficient at getting information, and the next big step is to enable them to collaborate. Law is about people: what do these people need as a remedy?
• Me -- what kinds of training will professors need to be able to teach in new ways?
• Steve Friedland -- we need to reframe from how are we teaching vs. how are they learning? "We need to get rebooted." What is our purpose: we are teaching them to be law students, and then we ask them to be lawyers.
• John Mitchell -- shift the figure ground so the cases, the statutes -- that's the library -- the clients/case/context is how we're teaching. That we can do without technology ("I have a handpuppet"). See, as lawyers do, that cases are the library -- going to a client-centric context.
• Ed Rubin explains what transactional work is, and laments how students never even see contracts. And how transactional work is non-zero-sum -- a different attitudinal approach than dispute-centered legal problems.
• Kellye Testy points out how drafting made a huge difference in understanding contracts in a class she taught: changes can be small, and it can go to learning what they should not adding more.
• Paula Lustbader -- so much we should be learning from undergrad, even kindergarten level. Describing a game to learn history in which students were so motivated -- "What would be our World War II simulation?"
• Peggy Davis -- learn law by using it, especially through simulation. Working collaboratively to solve problems is how we learn -- "structure a field of play." Is this happening in practice?
• Keith Stipe (Carolina Academic Press) -- where do we fit in?
• David Vladeck agrees that lawyers do practice collaboratively, cutting across firm boundaries -- students need to learn that lawyers need to collaborate with "the other side." "I want to grade them on their ability to collaborate with their peers." Silo-based learning is not conducive to learning how to practice, which cuts across these lines.
• Kraig -- making mistakes became OK, students making corrections points out that they're learning together.
• David Skover -- "Publishers have been leading us down the path for a long time, and only the fringe have moved away." Maybe it's time to prioritize the materials first. Publishers need to hear us -- this session is more for them. Also: as we innovate, are we going to lose the teaching of logical thinking that we excel at?
• Marilyn Berger underlines the importance of lesson plans / teaching goals so that new methods are not gimmicks. Also describes her collaboration with Aspen to create a textbook and website exactly as the professors imagined it -- addressing identified student needs. What about tenure -- why does it take 8 years before professors can be innovative?

And... here are the official notes from the conference for this session.

Liveblogging the CALI Conference 2008: Deliberate Practice and Skills Instruction

Larry Farmer of BYU School of Law is describing how he set up an intensive skills course -- which may not be cheaper than other methods, but which he believes to be superior in quality and results (largely because it requires adding adjunct instructors).

The problem: In his 8 years of observing lawyers practicing, Larry saw that interviewing and counseling skills levels would plateau quickly after some improvement over pre-existing skill set and remain relatively static. So: (a) What would it take to graduate students with greater skills, and (b) provide them with the tools for reflective practice to continue to improve in practice over the long haul.

The solution: Emulate how experts learn in other areas of practice such as sports and performing arts: deliberate practice.

In practice, this entailed:

• Dissecting the skill set: what were practitioners doing wrong?
• Motivating the students and providing them with sufficient practice experience to learn.

Attempts at reflection didn't succeed: They were shallow and didn't provide insight into actual performance. So they turned to recording. This changed the nature of class and what happened in class -- classes are often practice-centered, while much of the learning happens virtually, afterwards.

The core goal is to provide students with practice time and maximize their deliberate reflection on that practice. One effect of recording is to focus the students on the task of practice.

Evaluation challenge -- guiding feedback, providing technical ability to annotate; largely addressed with MediaNotes.

Management challenge -- how to move the video artifacts and feedback back and forth? BYU is using Sharepoint to manage documents and workflow. (Requires students to name files carefully). Students are paired up: in each pair, each student plays both a lawyer and a standardized client. Students inhabit that client role for the entire semester, but paired up with different student-lawyers, which improves their roleplaying skills over time as well.

In summary:

1. Lay out a sequence of skills
2. Provide a standardized client with whom to practice the skills
3. Provide the context in which to engage that client
4. Record the exercise
5. Provide a workflow within which to push the video to the reviewer and then back to the student

In the case of BYU, the expert reviewers are former students who performed well -- in part, a motivation and reward. These reviewers receive additional training in evaluation and feedback techniques, on top of their existing performance knowledge/skills. These adjunct faculty, who are in practice, also provide feedback to the simulations to ensure verisimilitude. This feedback is critical: just viewing videos of "good" practice doesn't seem to be enough for students to correct performance. These reviewers also reduces instructor overhead and burnout.

Despite initial skepticism, the BYU administration is expanding financial support to this program because of student feedback indicating expanded confidence in their own skills and efficacy.

How to get started when you don't have graduates to come back as reviewers? During the first few years, focus on developing this cadre of reviewers and offering less evaluation, except from the professor.

Liveblogging the CALI Conference 2008: Simulated Practice in-depth

SIMPLE is a system for authoring and managing practice simulations for professional learning, especially practices that are document- and transaction-centered. SIMPLE can, for example, articulate a multi-party negotiation, collaborative drafting of documents, complex litigation, etc.

Some articles about SIMPLE:

• Article: Authentic Fictions: Simulation, Professionalism, and Legal Learning (Clinical Law Review, PDF)
• Article: Simulations, Learning and the Metaverse (PDF)

Pedagogy of simulations

Often, students are coming in from essay/exam-based undergraduate course: thus some transitional learning is critical. At Strathclyde, lectures have been largely designed out in favor of transactional learning, with rare lectures focused on dynamic speakers. Otherwise, knowledge-transmission is pushed into webcasts/podcasts between sessions.

(More after the break)

-- Gene Koo

Overview of the SIMPLE interface

Student logs in and sees, essentially, an inbox of documents/communications related to one transaction, with calendar and tasks (much like Outlook). There's also a document bank (like Google Docs) that include documents, map of the fictional town where the simulation takes place, websites for fictional firms and companies, etc.

Backstage, teachers have a list of characters within the simulation and can assume that role. There's also a list of variables that allow the simulation to be modified in small but important ways to make each instance of the simulation unique (which doubles as a plagiarism-catching device). A Narrative Event Diagram shows how the transaction proceeds from the perspective of the staff, Non-Player Characters (staff puppets), Player Characters, and critical events that pop up.

Assessment

Student work is assessed as normal -- usually they submit a specific document like a motion or a memo. Feedback goes back to the student in role of the managing partner.

Students also conduct self- and peer-assessment, which provides early warning signals about slackers within teams. They also log times, much like they bill hours in practice.

Logistics of simulations

Simulations have generally run between 1-2 days to 12 weeks. This may have ripple effects on other courses: could their simulation activities suck up all of their time from other classes? It's a disruptive technology that changes everything about how teaching/learning happens.

What does this do to teaching? The instructors and mentors are essentially role-playing, responding to student-driven actions with more information (or mis-information) and documents.

(Note that in Glasgow, there are only TWO (2) full-time faculty for 270 students).

Simulation design

The simulation is designed to highlight particular areas of knowledge as well as specific skills. This would include "traps," such as one party having the wrong location for an accident requiring more investigation (or wasting resources pursuing a red herring).

Simulations are also built around "standardized clients" -- a term borrowed from medicine, in which "standardized patients" provide a common experience for all students that hits important learning points.

Simulations also need to catch students before they go off the track. Careful mentoring by the instructors should guide the firm (students) back on track, in-role as the students' supervisors. For example, in one case students tried to arrest funds at the bank, which would have taken the case out of bounds, so the tutors had to act in-role as the bank to reject the requests to steer the sim back.

(I would note that there is substantial overlap between designing a good simulation and designing a good computer game. See especially What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Literacy and Learning.

Practice management sessions help students analyze and cope with inter-personal team issues.

Simulation sharing

Simulations "blueprints" are big capital investments -- it makes eminent sense for teachers to share and modify them.

What does it take to make SIMPLE happen?
Two ways to interact with SIMPLE that do not require technical knowledge: (1) Build the simulation; (2) upload the simulation to the platform. The authoring tools have been simplified to allow laypeople to create simulations.

Thus, requires up-front investment in creating the simulation, which can be capital intensive.

However, in terms of ongoing execution, it only requires 1 Professor, 8 Mentors (post-grad adjuncts) -- the simulation requires little upkeep and maintenance. The Mentors play the various roles in the simulation, from the parties to the firm partners to shopkeepers or even unexpected characters.

Seeking information and ideas on innovative final formats

I have long been troubled by the traditional time-pressured, in-class law school final exam format.  In over a decade of teaching, I have always used a take-home format for my upper-level courses: I will often use a  48-hour format if I want some issue-spotting questions and a two-week format if I want more policy/research questions (and I always have strict word limits for each question).

In first-year classes, however, the use of non-traditional exam formats seems to create added stress for students and also creates some additional administrative headaches.  For this reason, I have traditionally used the standard in-class final exam formats for first-year classes (though I have been noticing some colleagues gravitating toward the one-day, eight-hour take home format for more and more 1L classes).

Never content to make things easy, this term in my Spring 1L Legislation course, I decided to try a combined take-home/in-class format (details here).  Though I do not yet know if my students liked this approach (perhaps they will tell me here), I do know that I liked the basic concept of combining the take-home and in-class formats for 1Ls.  I am wondering if anyone else has ever tried this and, more generally, about experiences and ideas concerning truly innovative final formats.

Posted by DAB

New Teaching Blog - The BLT

Elon University Law School, the home of Professor Steve Friedland, has starting a new blog on Learning and Teaching, "affectionately known as the BLT." "The blog is intended to serve as a forum for law teachers, students, administrators and practitioners to share different perspectives on how learning can be improved in law schools."

ellen s. podgor

Should Law Profs Require Student Blog Participation?

That's the question Adjunct Law Prof Blog editor Mitchell Rubinstein asked after noting that Barry Law School Adjunct Professor Marc John Randazza gives credit for student participation on his blog, The Legal Satyricon. The question has created a mini-dust storm in the blogosphere. Check out the comments to Rubinstein's original post and the following posts and their comments:

• Susan Cartier Liebel's post, Knickers Are Twisting Over Innovative Adjunct Telling Students They MUST Blog on Build a Solo Practice
• Scott Greenfield's post, Adjunct Accused of Misblawgary on Simple Justice
• Randazza's Post
• And Rubinstein's follow-up post on Adjunct Law Prof Blog

-- Joe Hodnicki

Do law profs have a duty to help student deal with disappointing grades?

I just saw via SSRN this new paper by Grant Morris, entitled "Preparing Law Students for Disappointing Exam Results: Lessons from Casey at the Bat," which asserts that law professors have a duty to help students deal with disappointing grades. Here is the paper's abstract:

It is a statistical fact of life that two-thirds of the law students who enter law school will not graduate in the upper one-third of their law school class.  Typically, those students are disappointed in their examination grade results and in their class standing.  Nowhere does this disappointment manifest itself more than in their attitude toward their classes.  In the fall semester of their first year, students are eager, excited, and willing to participate in class discussion.  But after they receive their first semester grade results, many students withdraw from the learning process — they are depressed and disengaged.  They suffer a significant loss of self-esteem.

This article considers whether law professors should prepare their students for the disappointing results — the poor grades — that many are certain to receive.  I assert that professors do indeed have a role to play — in fact, a duty to their students — to confront this problem.  I offer a strategy by which professors can acknowledge students' pre-examination anxiety and deal constructively with their impending disappointment.  There are lessons to be learned from Casey at the Bat, Ernest Lawrence Thayer's immortal poem about failure.

Should law schools support/cultivate an on-line notes archive?

In this post at the Conglomerate, Lisa Fairfax talks about a company that sells "professional typed notes for daily class lectures" to undergraduates.  Lisa (and commentors) explores whether a similar market could develop for law schools student notes.

The post has me thinking about whether law schools ought to formally and officially support and cultivate an on-line notes archive for its students.  Such an archive could provide helpful (and needed?) assistance to students who get sick or otherwise end up missing multiple classes.  moreover, law schools developing a notes archive could urge students to use the archive as a supplement, rather than a substitute, to robust class participation.  And schools could stress that these archives would provide a better study aid than expensive commercial products that cannot be professor-specific.

My sense is that there is always an informal note sharing network that students help create (and regularly tap into) in various ways.  But these informal networks cannot provide nearly the assistance or quality control that could exist in an archive formally and officially supported by a law school.

Finally, I think the creation of such an official archive could help justify a professor's decision to ban laptops from the classroom.  If students have ready access to an effective notes archive, it seems a lot less problematic to bar students from using a computer to take notes in class.

Posted by DAB

Adjuncts, Visitors, and Innovation

Because we have a small standing faculty, my school (Baylor) uses a number of adjunct professors to cover elective classes.   These adjuncts are often experienced practitioners from Austin and Dallas who have expertise that we need in narrow subject areas.  Over the past year, I have been talking to these adjuncts and their students, and found some surprising trends.  While they are generally very good teachers, they seem to rarely take chances.  Most use very traditional teaching and testing methods, and stick closely to a textbook.

This observation matches the memories I have of visiting professors who taught me as a law student.  With a few striking exceptions (such as Catherine MacKinnon), most seemed to use only the most traditional methods.  It's understandable that they would be this way, of course-- many were auditioning for a job and fearful of making a mistake. 

The cost of this conservatism by the "outsiders" in our midsts is that we are not seeing innovation from some of the most logical sources.  Perhaps we need to more often give them permission to try different things, and lessen the risk of being unconventional.

-- Mark Osler

What Pedagogic Value Does Podcasting Have?

In a comprehensive survey of the latest academic studies on the impact of podcasting on learning and teaching, Ashley Deal, a researcher in the  Office of Technology for Education & the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon University, found that podcasting follows the pattern of many campus technology innovations.

"As with any educational technology, whether and how podcasting impacts the quality of the learning experience and/or educational outcomes depends largely upon how the technology is put to use," Deal wrote.

So, does podcasting enhance education? "The answer to that question depends entirely on the educational context, including goals and appropriate learning activities, and on how the tool is implemented," said Deal.

"Podcasting does not contain any inherent value. It is only valuable inasmuch as it helps the instructor and students reach their educational goals, by facilitating thoughtful, engaging learning activities that are designed to work in support of those goals."

Download the white paper (PDF). -- Joe Hodnicki

A Primer for New Teachers

According to Howard Katz (Charlotte) and Kevin Oneill (Cleveland-Marshall) "no article ... has ever furnished detailed and comprehensive advice on how to teach a law school course — from choosing a book and designing a syllabus to orchestrating the classroom experience to creating and grading the final exam. That's the aim of their new article, Strategies and Techniques of Law School Teaching: A Primer for New Teachers, which is available on SSRN. -- Joe Hodnicki

Teaching Law as a Community of Practice

Last week I had the privilege of attending the inaugural meeting of the Negotiations Pedagogy at Program on Negotiation (NP@PON), "a new venture dedicated to improving the way people teach and learn about negotiation." NP@PON will be undertaking research, curriculum development, training and networking among those interested in negotiation pedagogy.

The all-day event featured two negotiation teachers who presented their innovative teaching approaches. Stephen Weiss of the Schulich School of Business (York University) in Toronto presented on "mega simulations;" Gerry Williams of J. Reuben Clark Law School (Brigham Young University) presented on video-annotation technology. Chris Dede, Harvard Graduate School of Education, commented from an educational perspective.

Aside from the content, what excited me most about this gathering was the way a community of practice (negotiation teachers) came together to teach each other about the craft of teaching. What's more, this group is committed to following through with responding to community needs, several of which were identified in small group discussions at the end of the event. Other ongoing support activities will include workshops/conferences, a literature review, briefing papers, and newsletters.

I would love to hear about efforts like this in other areas of law teaching. Do these kinds of conversations happen at AALS and similar venues, and are there systems to support work beyond the meetings? Who is out there convening these conversations?

- Gene Koo

presentation: New Skills & New Learning for Tomorrow's Lawyers

As you all know from earlier posts, I spent the autumn researching legal technology and education, examining how a changing practice environment affects what, and how, law schools should teach. The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, with LexisNexis, published the results as New Skills, New Learning: Legal Education & the Promise of Technology.

I will be presenting these findings and facilitating discussion about what legal educators (and others) can do to respond to emerging challenges at an upcoming Berkman Center luncheon:

Tuesday, May 22
12:30-1:30pm
23 Everett St, Cambridge MA
Webcast
Second Life

Your participation as a law school innovator would be very welcome. Please RSVP if you can attend. Hope to see you next week!

- Gene Koo

Urging exam (and paper) innovations

Posts by Dan Solove at Concurring Opinions and by Ethan Leib at PrawfBlawg provide insights on an important question for any would-be law school innovator.  Dan poses the question in the headline of his post when he asks "Should We Get Rid of the Law School In-Class Essay Exam?"

My answer is simple: YES!  I see very few pedagogical benefits from a traditional in-class exams (especially closed-book exams).  I think inertia, status quo biases and administrative convenience are the only reasons that traditional in-class exams persevere.  (Even more than essay exams, multiple-choice exams seem to place administrative convenience even higher in the scheme of evaluation priorities.) 

Ethan asserts that "'issue-spotting' over the course of a very compressed time period is [a skill] that lawyers actually use."  I suppose I can recall a few times getting a call from a client or fellow lawyer that called for a quick off-the-cuff analysis, but never was I asked to respond in the timeframe and form of an in-class exam.  (I often tell students that they risk a malpractice suit if they ever try to respond to a complicated legal problem in the manner we ask them to respond during an in-class exam.)

Except in my first-year criminal law course, I never give a traditional in-class exam (and, were it not for the administrative headaches I would create for students and colleagues, I definitely would change to a take-home exam in my first-year course as well).  For various classes, I have assigned 48 hour take-home tests, one- and two-week take home tests, traditional research papers and non-traditional written projects (such as the white-paper assignment in my death penalty course this term).  Though creating and grading non-traditional exams and paper assignments is not easy, the pay-off is usually exceptional.  Perhaps more importantly, I can justify to myself and to my students how the exam/paper experience further develops real lawyering skills rather than just being a "who-can-show-off-while-reading-and-writing-quickly" contest.

Perhaps just to generate some comments, I challenge readers to provide any truly satisfying pedagogical justification for in-class law school exams.  I also encourage readers to report on exam innovations that perhaps could replace in-class exams as a law school norm.

Posted by DAB

Are Law Schools Failing to Teach Logic?

According to Senior US Circuit Judge Ruggero Aldisert (and two of his law clerks), law schools no longer teach logic in Logic for Law Students: How to Think Like a Lawyer (SSRN) -- Joe Hodnicki

Bias in Evaluations

A new study finds racial bias in calling fouls on the basketball court in the NBA. Here is the NY Times characterization:

A coming paper by a University of Pennsylvania professor and a Cornell University graduate student says that, during the 13 seasons from 1991 through 2004, white referees called fouls at a greater rate against black players than against white players. Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School, and Joseph Price, a Cornell graduate student in economics, found a corresponding bias in which black officials called fouls more frequently against white players, though that tendency was not as strong.

The NY Times quotes Yale Law Professor Ian Ayres (author of the brilliant book Pervasive Prejudice) on the study:

“I would be more surprised if it didn’t exist,” Mr. Ayres said of an implicit association bias in the N.B.A. “There’s a growing consensus that a large proportion of racialized decisions is not driven by any conscious race discrimination, but that it is often just driven by unconscious, or subconscious, attitudes. When you force people to make snap decisions, they often can’t keep themselves from subconsciously treating blacks different than whites, men different from women.”

Note that this study seems to reveal discrimination even conducted in the most public of settings--with high definition video cameras recording all movements amidst the scrutiny of millions of, often highly expert, independent fans.

Law professors, of course, are not immune to societal biases. Thankfully, most law school grading is conducted through blind-graded exams. Yet, there are a significant number of assessments that are not performed without knowledge of the student's identity. These include: seminars, legal practice courses, independent studies, and student participation components of grades.

What can be done to ameliorate the potential problem? I expect that education is an important component of the response. We should understand our own potentials for bias and seek to weed it out.

Anupam Chander

Teaching New Teachers: From Book Selection to Final Exam

Howard Katz (Charlotte) and Kevin Oneill (Cleveland State) have deposited Strategies and Techniques of Law School Teaching: A Primer for New Teachers in SSRN. The author's believe their article is the first to provide "detailed and comprehensive advice on how to teach a law school course — from choosing a book and designing a syllabus to orchestrating the classroom experience to creating and grading the final exam." -- Joe Hodnicki