CELL Blog | Center for Engaged Learning in the Law

I’ve come to realize a lot of professors (maybe all of them?) seriously chafe at the phrase, “I had to teach this course to myself.” And I can understand why. Here you have a professor who has studied longer and who has earned more degrees than the students – who has prepared (I use that term rather loosely in some cases) a syllabus and chosen a book – and who has come to class day in, day out, and done their best (I hesitate to use this term at all in some other cases) to teach you something. And what do they get? Told by their students that they really didn’t teach at all.

In all honesty, a lot of time that phrase is uttered in empty frustration, and beneath it lies not the fact that the professor didn’t teach, but only the fact that the students feel they didn’t learn very much, which may very well be due to a number of variables too numerous to discuss. And a lot of times, what students are griping about is little more than the unthinkable fact that they had to work really hard to understand a concept that was never easy for anyone to explain/understand, and their professor hasn’t made it the essence of clarity either.

But then there are those classes you really do teach to yourself, and I have been privileged enough to have taken such a course.

Let me say from the outset: I gave up on this course early on (about week 5), attended only because each attendance was mandatory in the syllabus, and used my class time to vastly improve my Scrabble game. I admit this straight out, right here, from the beginning.

But why did I – a pretty darn studious nerd by most standards – give up on a course so early and to such an extent? And where do I get off telling an expert in the given field that I had to teach the course to myself?

Well, to start with, I never much cared for standup comedy. I mean, I used to like watermelon-smashing Gallagher back in the day, but aside from him, standup comics never really held my attention very well. When the standup comic is my law professor, the result is just disastrous. Don’t get me wrong: I think my previous blogs have made my preference for comedic relief pretty evident, and I love when a professor is a funny professor as well as a good one. But when the professor is only funny…

The first few days of this particular course were darn funny. We liked this professor. This professor amused us. But then we all started to realize we were really only being amused, and this course was a little lacking in substance. Actually…no…it was a LOT lacking in substance. And this book was a wretched plague upon humanity (I submit that no book should be 1/3 text, 1/3 parenthetical phrases, and 1/3 footnotes. NO BOOK. EVER. It’s evil and vile and wrong.) so no help there. And… wait… did the professor just start blatantly substituting opinion for fact…? Oh my. I know that isn’t what the Court held… Maybe it’s what you think it should have held… But… Um… It didn’t. For the sake of my own GPA, I think this would be a good time to tune this one out.

Scrabble, anyone? Yes, indeed. And this time, I wasn’t playing against the slackers. Oh no! I was playing against the top brass, kids. The cream of the crop. The presidents, the editors, and the holders of really impressive GPAs. We had all given up.

But the proof is in the pudding, as they say, and my proof that I really did have to teach this course to myself (and that I could, which amused me terrifically) came during the days leading up the exam. I was sent an outline by a student who had clearly done nothing but transcribe everything our amusing professor said. I read this outline to see if I had, in fact, missed anything important in those mandatory lost hours. Beneath the tears of laughter streaming down my face was the realization that this entire outline – a loose transcription of the entire course – was just pure gibberish. It made NO logical sense. Something to do with an eight-year old… everything is “clearly” this or that, except that it’s all about as clear as mud… oh, wait… now something to do with due process of law…grandmothers…hookers… were the grandmothers also the hookers…? I passed this outline around to my friends – also rather studious types – and watched as their eyes grew wide and they started doubling over in laughter (well, those of them that didn’t leap to their feet to find the poor person who was perhaps relying on these 30 pages of total bunk).

And then we all got to the tedious act of starting all over from scratch – the much-debated outline of one of my favorite profs in-hand of course (which saved my butt, thank you very much) – and teaching the course to ourselves. We went to Westlaw and printed the syllabi of every main case (a daunting list). We put them in binders. We read them start to finish. We made them into chronological lists to see patterns over time (our book liked to talk in chronology but have us read the cases from the middle outward in all directions). We printed law review articles covering the policies behind the more prominent cases. We debated the pros and cons. We made mock tests for each other based off other (reliable) outlines and supplements. We read other texts and mountains of cram books. And in four days, we taught ourselves the basics of the course. And I’m pretty sure my friends and I passed (perhaps only by the Grace of God, but we passed).

I’m told this sort of occurrence – standup comedy in lieu of teaching – happens as a result of knowing one’s subject so well, and having written so many books containing naught but your own opinion on the subject, that, when teaching, one forgets to mention the rule to which one’s opinion applies. One neglects to account for the fact that most students can’t really debate the subtleties of the policies behind a rule until they, you know, know the rule. And one perhaps forgets that one’s own opinion is not how it is, no matter how much that’s how one believes it should be.

So when your students tell you they had to teach a course to themselves, keep this little diatribe in mind. I’m sure the vast majority of you will immediately defer to my blog about whiny students, assured as you are that your teaching prowess is second-to-none and certainly a lot better than Gallagher standup. But if perchance you should have a doubt or two, here remains a little food for thought.

Thursday, May 8, 2008, 10:39 AM –
Posted by Gerry Hess

One of my colleagues organized a meeting of all the faculty members who will teach first-year students next year. The purpose of the meeting was for us to discuss our goals for first-year students and to explore ways to collaborate to achieve those goals.

I was hopeful. I was skeptical. My hopes and fears were realized.

Some of the meeting descended into faculty whining about students – indifferent work ethic, failure to listen, deficient writing skills, etc. I think these faculty members needed to get these comments out before moving on to more productive matters. The semester had just ended and my colleagues were feeling a bit of burn out.

However, I believe that my colleagues care about their students and work hard to be effective teachers. Much of the meeting reflected my colleagues’ commitment to their students’ learning.

We explored what level of analytical sophistication we should expect from students by the end of the first semester.

We agree that we needed to help students integrate their learning in their first year courses.

We discussed our obligation to give feedback to students in the first semester of law school and committed to giving a midterm exams (graded or practice) in October.

I left the meeting with hope. We had taken a small step to collaborate for the benefit of our students. We had reaffirmed the need for us to support one another’s efforts to help our students become effective lawyers.

Big changes start with little actions.

As is reflected in numerous articles, conversations and email discussions, getting feedback on your teaching by looking at course evaluations provides limited information. There is no time for elaboration or follow-up. This year, in part because I was using a completely new teaching strategy, Team Based Learning, and wanted to know more about students’ experience with it, I accepted a colleague’s offer of spending half an hour with students to learn about their perceptions of the teaching strategy in greater depth.

Similar to the Student Group Instructional Diagnoses Gerry Hess referred to in his earlier blog, I prepared three questions for my colleague. What aspects of Team Based Learning had worked well over the semester? What could be improved? What suggestions did students have for adapting the Team Based Learning strategy to other courses? I introduced my colleague to my Remedies students at the beginning of the last class of the semester, and told them that she would collect their feedback anonymously. I left the room; she exited 30 minutes later with pages of notes.

When we talked about her findings the next day, it was fascinating to hear about students’ perceptions. A skilled interviewer, my colleague was able to listen to what was said as well as what was unsaid. She also asked a number of follow-up questions to clarify her understanding of students’ comments. Several of the findings were particularly surprising. For example, many of the students really liked the Team Based Learning model, as it reduced stress, greatly eliminated the sense of working in isolation, allowed them to learn more by hearing the classmates’ perspectives and reading their classmates’ analyses of problems, and made the time go faster because they were more engaged. But many of these students commented that this approach worked only because this was a small elective course and because most of them already knew each other. It would not work in a large required course, such as Torts, which is exactly where I am considering trying this strategy next fall.

Not only was the material from my colleague’s class interview fascinating, but it also provided helpful information that I hadn’t received from a variety of minute papers and course questionnaires I used during the semester. For example, by the end of the semester, students had heard from a guest speaker, had practiced making trial-level arguments about the validity of different kinds of remedies and how to measure them, completed a team assessment project and written a number of different documents. At the end of the course, they came up with a number of creative ideas for how we could have applied a number of different problems and different projects to the Team Based Learning.

It’s great to have this kind of in-depth feedback during and at the end of the course. I’ll take what my colleague learned and compare it to the student course evaluations. And even though they suggested otherwise, I am planning to use a Team Based Learning approach to teaching Torts and Legal Writing next year. I’m hopeful that I can persuade my colleague to again come to class and learn about how it worked the second time around.

Today, I am offering a page from my teaching diary (for what it’s worth).

I conducted a review session today in anticipation of my final examination. I decided to conduct the review in the form of a jeopardy game. I divided the students into four groups. I gave the students the past exam question I wanted to use as the basis for the game one week ago, and I asked them all to write out their analyses of the hypo.

I then created PowerPoint slides in which I hyperlinked the points (I used points instead of dollar amounts) to slides with the answers for which the students had to provide questions. It did produce some very awkward and very long questions, “What is, on the one hand, . . ., but, on the other hand, . . .” The winning team was promised cookies.

Here’s what worked: The students were very engaged and very excited to participate, and they considered the material from a new perspective. The class went over by two or three minutes, and no one seemed to mind. The hypo was a very good one for teaching students many of the things I wanted them to learn from a practice exam review, and, as we went we discussed those meta-lessons.

Here’s what I will need to fix for next time: First, I made a few errors in my hyperlinks. Second, because everyone was providing the questions and was doing so orally and because I did not have slides that showed the answers, my students who learn by reading may not have followed the discussion as well as I would have liked, and, in fact, one student suggested that change to this exercise. Third, one team ended up far ahead of the others so that the final jeopardy was anti-climatic (that team bet zero because they were guaranteed to win with the number of points they already had).

~Mike

In my International Environmental Law course, each student is responsible for 20 minutes of a class session. The students are to split those sessions between presentation and facilitation of active engagement by the rest of the class. Students understand that time management is a critical to the success of the session. To help them with time management, I spent 5 minutes in class offering my two cents.

1.    Time management is important, not just for students but for their teachers too. Time management is hard, not just for students but for their teachers too. But there are things we can do to help us manage time effectively.

2.    Less is more, less is more, less is more. Decide what few items of content and skills are important for the session and focus on those. The best way for us to manage time is to plan an appropriate amount of things to do in the time allotted. By violating the less is more principle, we create our own time management problems. After we expend considerable effort to learn the topic, plan visuals, craft exercises, we then try to inject all of that into the session. Nope. A critical step is for us to decide which of the wonderful things we know, impressive slides we created, and clever exercises we designed, we are NOT going to use.

3.    Make sure the most important stuff happens and is not rushed. In our fantasies, we present/facilitate sessions that build to a powerful, dramatic conclusion, with our best stuff at the end. Nope. Most of us can’t make this happen consistently. Instead, our great stuff gets jammed in at the end, or even worse, in the few minutes after class was supposed to end. Instead, make sure the important things happen in the beginning and middle of the session, with plenty of time to spare.

4.    Plan omissions. Before the session, decide what parts can be dropped if time is becoming short during the session. What topics, visuals, exercises can be skipped? You can be the only one who knows that you skipped them.

5.    Sacrifice presentation for facilitation. For most people in the presentation/facilitation role, default mode is that we talk. We have control. We have important stuff to say! Often, however, learning would be enhanced not by us saying more, but by the participants doing more.

And now I see my time is up…

Thursday, April 17, 2008, 01:11 PM –
Posted by Sophie Sparrow

Over the past few years I have visited 2L and 3L students doing full-time externships. Most of these 2L and 3L externs I have never taught before. At each visit I have been impressed by the students’ professionalism and performance. The students are savvy about how their experience fills in the gaps left from classroom instruction. They notice where they need to improve; they realize how complex law practice is. In short, they learn many lessons that are taught, but not necessarily learned, in law school.

The supervising attorneys note areas where the student externs can improve, but they also almost always comment upon how much the students have contributed and grown over the course of the externship. Supervising attorneys praise externing students for their work-ethic, ability to take constructive criticism and interest in making the most of their externship experience.

When I return to the law school, I rave about how exciting and inspiring it is to see students on the cusp of their profession rising to the challenge and doing so well. I tell any colleague who will listen about how uplifting it is to see 2Ls and 3Ls engaged in their work and excited about their future opportunities.

Contrast this to the response I sometimes get: “You saw THAT student? THAT student is doing a good job?” followed by comments that in another course THAT student was unprofessional, unprepared, disengaged, etc.

As the parent of two teenagers, I take great comfort in the phrase that “the best indicator of who your children are is how they behave around others.” I realize it is a lesson I need to apply to students. Our students are who they are with others, not just in our class. The next time I get frustrated with a student who is unprepared or unprofessional, I am going to try not to fall into the trap of only seeing that side of the student, but instead to envision the student in a suit, working for a supervising attorney and doing a great job.

Monday, April 7, 2008, 10:05 AM –
Posted by Michael Hunter Schwartz

So far, I have received more than 70 nominations. The inspiration I have found in just reading the nominations has already justified my effort in creating this project. There are many inspiring law teachers out there. Here is a link to the list of nominees: http://washburnlaw.edu/bestlawteachers/nominees/. I encourage you to visit on a day when you are looking for inspiration.

One common comment from nominators has stood out so far– the nominees care about their students and manifest that caring in many, many ways. Most not only know their students’ names, but also take the time to learn about their students as people. Several stay in touch with their students long after they graduate. All are genuinely accessible to their students well beyond the classrom walls.

All seem to care about how well their students learn, seeing their students’ success in learning as a measure of the work they do as teachers. Most provide multiple opportunities for practice and feedback so the students can self-regulate their learning.

But it all starts with caring about their students.

I can’t wait to learn more!

~Mike

In designing a classroom environment, the book, “How People Learn: Bridging Researech and Practice” (National Academy Press 2007), argues that “attention must be given to what is taught (information, subject matter), why it is taught (understanding), and what competence or mastery looks like.” Id. at 21. I am intrigued by this assertion, especially as it relates to mastery. While I think I know mastery when I see it – on exams, in classes, and in a courtroom — I generally do not articulate what mastery is for students or spend time explicitly modeling what it looks like, other than having students write in class and then reviewing it. In thinking about mastery for law students, I think at least three things are useful for cognitive advancement: (1) a knowledge of “big picture” frameworks or maps of a subject area; (2) a deep understanding of rules (i.e., what they mean, not just what they say); and (3) application of the rules and principles to different fact settings (a transfer of knowledge).

The question still remains for me as to what competency looks like in different subjects like Torts and Criminal Law (and whether there are substantive components required for competency) and more generally what mastery looks like in the classroom, in preparation for classes or even on exams. In response to these ruminations, I have started inserting “metacognitive moments” in classes, where I try to explicitly describe what I am trying to achieve and what success looks like. Whether these “moments” are helpful (or just senior moments) remain to be seen.

Should final exams be worth as much as 75% of a course grade? Perhaps not if we are trying to conduct humane authentic assessment. A recent higher education listserv contained postings about how to weight a final exam, including comments that weighting a final exam as much as 65% was a bit steep. Other contributors, all teachers committed to student-centered teaching and learning, suggested that around 33% was about right. One even noted that in law the only determinative was “Just the final exam. Talk about stress!” In practice it’s more valuable to stay on top of assignments rather than cram before a deadline. But don’t we – and the bar exam – teach and reinforce students cramming at the end? This semester I let my upper-level students work out how much the final would count – their choice: 20%. It means more assignments and assessments but they practice more often and, I hope, learn more.

Tuesday, March 25, 2008, 01:27 PM –
Posted by Michael Hunter Schwartz

I am in search of the best law teachers in this country, and I could use your help. I have the extraordinary opportunity to conduct a law professor-focused, follow-up study to Ken Bain’s wonderful WHAT THE BEST COLLEGE TEACHERS DO (Harvard University Press, 2004).

Thus, this posting is a solicitation of nominations. In particular, I am looking for teachers who consistently produce extraordinary learning, who change their students’ lives and whose instruction stays with students long after they graduate from law school.

I hope what I produce inspires you as much as Professor Bain’s work has inspired me. Over the next three years, I will be:
** soliciting nominations;
** gathering evidence of nominees’ excellence;
** paring the list of nominees to the most extraordinary law teachers; and then
** visiting law schools around the country, sitting in on classes, interviewing the nominees, and talking to focus groups of students and alumni; and then publishing what I have found in a book: WHAT THE BEST LAW TEACHERS DO (Harvard University Press, forthcoming 2011).

I have set up a web nomination process (although I will also accept nominations by phone, by e-mail, by regular mail, or in person). To nominate a candidate or learn more about this project, please go to http://washburnlaw.edu/bestlawteachers. Click on the link on the right side of the page to get to the nomination form.

To honor those who have been nominated, I have set up a website on which I will report the name of each nominee, the nominee’s institutional affiliation, and a few comments from the nominator. Here’s a link to that website: http://washburnlaw.edu/bestlawteachers/ … index.php.

I hope to gather as many nominations as possible, so I would appreciate any efforts to forward this message to your colleagues, listservs, students, and alumni. If you are a blogger, please post this information on your blog.

Feel free to e-mail me at michael.schwartz@washburn.edu if you have any questions. The names of nominators and nominees will be withheld upon request.