CELL Blog | Center for Engaged Learning in the Law

I just completed a Small Group Instructional Diagnosis with one of my colleagues. I’d read about the SGID process but had never experienced it until today. My colleague is an experienced educator who is in her first year of teaching Legal Research and Writing at Gonzaga. She wanted to gather formative feedback from her students that went deeper than the end-of-the-semester numerical and narrative student evaluations.

Last week, my colleague and I met to plan the SGID process. She agreed to produce a document that divided her (17) students into groups of three or four. We discussed the types of feedback she hoped to gather and I drafted the following handout.

***
Small Group Feedback to Professor ________

The purpose of this activity is to provide feedback to Professor ______about your learning and her teaching. In your small group, please address the four questions below. For each question, please record one or two responses on which the group reaches consensus. You have about 10 minutes to do so.

1. What aspects of Professor _______’s classroom teaching are most effective for you?

2. Evaluate the Writer’s Workshop. As a result of the Writer’s Workshop are you better able to diagnose and remedy problems in your own writing?

3. What aspects of Professor _______’s teaching are least effective for you?

4. What suggestions do you have to enhance Professor_______’s teaching and your learning in this class?
***

Earlier this week, my colleague described the SGID process briefly to her students. Today, I observed the first half of her class and then facilitated the SGID process for the final 25 minutes of class. Students spent 10 minutes in their small groups. Then in a large group sessionwe listed on a whiteboard the responses on which the students had consensus. One of the students captured the list on a computer and emailed me the results. An hour later, my colleague and I discussed the SGID process and results.

My colleague appreciated the confirmation that many aspects her teaching were working well for students. She also welcomed the students’ thoughtful suggestions about how the course could be even more effective for them. As she left my office, she was planning how to implement several student suggestions and how to explain her rationale for several of her teaching methods.

The SGID experience gave me hope. The students were insightful, respectful, and professional. They took the process seriously, welcomed the opportunity to provide formative feedback, and worked well cooperatively. Likewise, my colleague was insightful about her own teaching decisions, respectful of her students as learners, and professional in her approach to developing as a teacher. She really gets that the bottom line is not our performance but our students’ learning—our performance is relevant to our students learning—but our performance should not be an end in itself.

As we know, “thinking like a lawyer” really means “analyzing complex law and facts in a concise, precise and organized way…. IN WRITING.”

When a guest speaker came to speak to all our first year students yesterday, he said that too many new lawyers don’t know to write.

What can we do to provide more opportunities to learn how to write well?

To help students learn to write, I often give them exercises to write in class or in preparation for class. Sometimes I’d have the students exchange papers with each other to read someone else’s perspective, and then I’d collect, comment and return.

This semester in Remedies I am trying something new – teaching students in teams. As part of that approach, students see many examples of each other’s work. Seeing each others’ writing has had remarkable and unanticipated beneficial consequences.

1. Immediacy. Feedback for students is crucial, and the sooner it is received the better. When students bring an assignment to class, and then immediately review their classmates’ writing, they get immediate feedback.The problem is fresh, they can appreciate others’ perspectives.

2. Modeling. The first time we did this, a few students did a terrific job. The second time students had to bring a written assignment to class they had the advantage of having seen high quality work, and most students performed at a higher level.

3. Efficiency. Because students had copies of each others’ writings, I could give feedback by suggesting they look at their classmates’ work. I could direct them to “look at Nathan’s work” and they could compare it to their own rather than reading my notes about what they could do differently.

4. Self-awareness. Mining their classmates’ responses to solving the same problem also showed students specific areas where they could improve. Every student had something of value in his or her writing that no one else had. During the class and small group discussions where they read writings from the class, students commented on what they learned from reading their classmates’ work.

5. Connection to practice. Even though I teach a legal writing course regularly, I was struck by how powerful it was for students to see each others’ work. Third year students commented how rarely this happened in law school, and how valuable it was for them to see the way someone else organized legal points and wove in policy arguments. This is, after all, what we do in practice.

Ingredients:

1. Written problem handed out in advance (have all students work on the same problem)
2. Clear directions for responding to problem

Steps:

1. Assign all students to prepare a written analysis of a problem.
2. Ask them to bring copies to class (or give you electronic or hard copy beforehand).
3. Compile, copy and distribute.
4. Give students time to read and discuss (in small groups). What would they include in the best written analysis?
5. Listen to discussion.