Teaching law students in law school before they become 'baby sharks'
Imagine for a minute that you are running your own law school. Got it? Now imagine a wealthy philanthropist gifted you $80 million to improve your law students' performance. But there's a condition. You have to spend the money on individual law teachers' salaries and development. No-brainer right? You'd think that student achievement would improve. …
Continue reading Could collaborative planning improve law students’ performance?
Do a quick search of 'impostor syndrome'. What did you find? What about 'impostor syndrome in law school'? That produces some worrying results. There is a mountain of advice about how self-professed 'impostors' - law students, lawyers and academics - can heal themselves. A lot of it is good advice about talking to other people. …
Continue reading Law school ‘impostors’ need allies not accomplices
Reflective thinking is a professional skill. While the law school curriculum emphasises the development of reflective thinking, there is very little guidance on teaching it. When we think about 'reflection', we have a tendency to define it as remembering something - an event, something someone did, or even something we did. That's important. But that's …
Continue reading The 5 steps of reflective practice as a professional skill in law school
Typos, misspelling, wrong names and inconsistent dates in law school problem questions - they are usually a source of huge embarrassment for law teachers. But they are much closer to the way lawyers often get client instructions. 'Mistakes’ can teach law students real-world skills responding to ambiguity. Clients rarely arrive in lawyers’ offices with neatly …
Continue reading ‘Mistakes’ teach law students real-world skills responding to ambiguity
Writing case notes is a common form of assessment in law school, especially with first-year law students, as a way of exposing them to basic legal research, writing and thinking skills before moving on to substantive subjects. More importantly, the preparation of a case note is usually the first taste first-year law students have of …
Continue reading Some practical steps to teaching case note research in law school