Teaching law students in law school before they become 'baby sharks'
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 'imposters' - law students, lawyers and academics - can heal themselves. A lot of it is good advice about talking to other people. …
Continue reading Law school ‘imposters’ 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
This is the second in a series of posts on theories of learning and teaching – specifically the concepts of formal or explicit curricula and informal, implicit or ‘hidden’ curriculum.
I came across this helpful article on 'Helping Students Become 21st-Century “Crap Detectors” ' over on the Touro College Learning and Teaching Exchange blog written by Dennis Urban. The immediacy and prevalence of online sources in modern classrooms mean that many of our law students are more inclined to use Google as a research tool than …