Implementing Best Practices and Educating Lawyers
Session 8 Workshops

Wednesday, June 24, 2009 – 3:00-4:15 p.m.

[A] Interpersonal Dynamics

Joshua Rosenberg, University of San Francisco School of Law

This session will consist of some of the activities and ideas that form the classroom component for the class in Interpersonal Dynamics for Attorneys (see "Interpersonal Dynamics: Helping Lawyers Learn the Skills, and the Importance, of Human Relationships in the Practice of Law," 58 Miami L. Rev. 1225 (2004)). The concepts presented, and then practiced, in this session include:

  1. the importance of effective feedback and the concept of feedback as self-disclosure,
  2. the need for self-awareness in the giving and receiving of effective feedback, and
  3. the value of, and the means to, stay focused on the "here and now."

[B] Ground Control to Major Tom: A Model for Crafting the Formative Feedback Law Students Need as They Prepare for Launch

Cindy R. Slane, Quinnipiac University School of Law and Liz Ryan Cole, Vermont Law School

Although both the Carnegie Report and Best Practices stress the critical role of formative feedback in professional education, available evidence suggests that most of the feedback law students receive is summative in nature: letter grades on end-of-term exams designed to rank students for prospective employers rather than guide them as they prepare for the professional roles they will assume upon graduation. Positing that our collective failure in this regard may stem more from a lack of facility with crafting effective formative feedback than from a conviction that current practices are pedagogically sound, this workshop proposes a straightforward fix (a four-step, formative-feedback model grounded on improved fluency in the language of critique) and invites participants to learn-by-doing as they offer affirming and corrective formative feedback on a simulated feedback conference – in four-step format, of course!

[C] Best Intentions, Worst Results: The Potential Pitfalls of Innovative Teaching

Nancy Soonpaa, Texas Tech University School of Law

This session addresses some potential pitfalls related to innovative teaching and how to manage, minimize, and eliminate them. Pitfalls include challenges inherent in the innovations themselves, as well as resistance from students and misunderstanding of colleagues. The workshop will identify four to six examples of teaching innovations, including technology, multiple assessments, using creative non-law examples, small groups and peer assessment, and multiple-source assigned readings, and discuss how to anticipate and help to prevent problems with implementing them. The session will include time for the audience to share their own experiences, ideas, and preventative measures with the entire group.

[D] Teaching Students How to "Think Like a Lawyer"

Peter Wendel, Pepperdine University School of Law

While virtually everyone agrees that the purpose of law school is to teach students how to "think like a lawyer," most lawyers and law professors say it is impossible to articulate what that means. Thinking like a lawyer is an active process; it cannot be described, it can only be experienced. This interactive workshop will challenge that assumption. It will offer a conceptual model of what it means to "think like a lawyer" – as well as demonstrate how it can be taught.

[E] Ending Our Sermonizing: Experiencing Professional Responsibility

David F. Chavkin, Washington College of Law, American University

Although the Carnegie Foundation Report took legal education to task in several areas, it is perhaps in the "values" apprenticeship that American legal education has most failed students, clients, and society. Ethics remains "the dog" of the curriculum and too many schools continue to teach ethics as a rules-based course. In this workshop, we will explore a very different method of teaching ethics by integrating theory and practice. Through live-client representation, students finally see the ethical rules in context. Professional responsibility then comes alive for the first time.