BLOG POST: Your first post will be briefly establishing your focus for this course, choose what works best for your goals whether it's instruction you will do in the future, instruction you have done previously, or if you have neither of those options available to you, make up a teaching scenario that you would like to use. Read pages 1-6 of Fink's Guide and use your blog to complete the worksheet on page 7. Then read pages 8-10 and use your blog to complete the questions on pages 11-12 to begin parsing out goals for your instruction. These could be two separate posts or one combined post, your choice. Some questions lean more toward higher ed instruction, so if this is not your environment, adapt the questions to your situation. For example, in Question 2 if you are a public librarian, you could read it as: "What learning expectations are placed on this course or workshop by: the community, the library system, those involved in this subject area, society?"
Situational Goals
1. Specific Context of the Teaching/Learning
Situation
Background: I teach a
required, two credit Legal Research course in the Fall semester to first year law students. Law
school is typically a 3-year degree on the full time schedule. We are in the midst
of implementing a part time program starting this fall, and chances are I will
be teaching in that program as well when it launches.
In the full time program,
classes usually meet for 90 minutes each week, and in the past few years, we
have consolidated a year long course into a semester (for both pedagogical and
practical reasons that are a bit too long to go into here). We have moved to a “flipped classroom” model
where students read material from the textbook we have written, as well as
review short videos covering those topics before class. Students are expected to
complete all reading/review all videos before the start of class.
In the classroom, we
usually review any questions from the reading, and there may be a very short lecture to elaborate on a particular concept or to
help illustrate how to move through a problem in one of the online legal
research systems.
From there, we then move
into an exercise that usually takes up most of the class. Exercises can be in
print or in electronic format (sometimes both) and hopefully there is
substantial amount of time to discuss how each student/group approached the
problem how they got to an answer, and
why they thought that was an answer.
Class takes place in the
students’ “seminar” rooms, where most of their small classes meet (teachers
come into the small classroom, as opposed to students traveling to different
ones, though they do move to larger classrooms for larger classes).
Currently, given other
curricular considerations, I am lucky that the class has been capped to 16 – 18
students per semester. Previously, in year long incarnations, I have taught
anywhere from 25 – 50 students each semester…and the larger numbers were not
conducive to the best learning environment for students.
2. General Context of the Learning Situation
Our course is required for
graduation; students who fail will need to take it again in order to graduate (and are given the option as to whether or not they take it with the teacher who failed them previously).
Both the profession and the law school emphasize that the ability to perform
competent legal research for your clients is a professional responsibility, as
attorneys who fail to perform adequate legal research on behalf of their
clients can – and have – been sued for malpractice.
3. Nature of the Subject
Legal research is tricky
in that first year law students usually have no prior
experience in researching the law. They also have no understanding of how the
law “works” other than what they “might” have had as undergraduate students or
learned on their own. We lay a framework reviewing the judicial system and
common law principles as applied to federal and our particular state systems.
We also introduce them to statutory law and the concept of administrative law
later in the semester. Even with students with some legal background (e.g. paralegals), sometimes we have to work with them to break "bad habits" in how they have done legal research in prior settings (For example, relying on the most expensive databases or sources).
This all happens
simultaneously with the other classes they’re taking their first semester, and
it can be overwhelming. We need to teach them the tools to search for legal
materials…but in their first semester they aren’t proficient at legal analysis,
which is what helps them become better legal researchers.
Law constantly changes
given the common law nature of the United States. New
cases/statutes/regulations are constantly added, and to top it off, the major
electronic legal research systems used by today’s attorneys are continually evolving
as well. It can be difficult for teachers to keep up with both the systems and
the substantive nature of law as it evolves, and then translating that into
lessons that will work with a beginning learner.
4. Characteristics of the Learners
Our law school tends to
draw from a wide variety of experiences and types of learners. We have students
coming straight from college, and others who have been activists of some kind
in the greater community before coming to law school. For some students, law school
is their second or third career. It’s not unusual for me to have teachers,
social workers, paralegals, and Peace Corp members in the same class, and it’s
a great benefit of teaching to have so many different types of students in the
classroom. Our school’s mission is one of social justice, and our graduates
eventually go work in the public interest or open up their own practices. In
this type of mix, it’s often difficult to determine at first what will work
best for the group, because often I’m not sure of where they are in terms of
comfort with electronic research OR print research OR with just general ideals
of law. Let's just say that every time I teach the course, I tend to brace for surprises.
5. Characteristics of the Teacher
I am a firm believer that
the best teachers admit they are continually learning, and that they don’t know
“everything.” I try to make the classroom welcome and opening to the students,
so that they are willing to approach me with their questions about either legal
research technique or the legal analysis they are making as we go through the
class. I am also a very firm believer in letting them know that if they’re not
“getting” something, the issue could be me and how I communicate it to
them, or the materials, and my job is to help them figure out how best to learn
the material, because it’s all really new to them and how they learned in their
prior academic lives may not necessarily translate to how the “law” is learned.
In many ways, I try to prepare them for the actual practice of law by getting
them comfortable with the idea of asking “authority figures” question after
question after question – because if they’re to become effective advocates,
they need to become comfortable doing so. I am also constantly reassuring them
that if they’re not “getting” it – it’ll come together eventually, and we’ll
all get there in the end.
Questions for Formulating Significant Learning
Goals
"A year (or more)
after this course is over, I want and hope that students will …”
Foundational Knowledge
- Basic legal structure of courts (federal and state systems)
- How case law (common law), statutes and regulations are formed and how to find them using legal research tools
- How to update the law to determine it’s still current and “good law”
- Familiarity with the major electronic legal research databases and how to navigate within them
- Remembering to consider costs when executing a legal research process
- Know they can come back to me or any of the legal research faculty for additional help during the rest of their career (in law school and afterwards…we tend to reassure them that even as alumni they can call on us…and they do)
Application Goals
In our course, ideally,
students need to do all three types of learning (critical, creative and
practical).
Their final project is usually in several
parts, but the major portion of their final paper they are given a legal
problem and are expected to: 1) identify the legal issue and extract relevant
terms, 2) find relevant case law and statutes relating to the issue, 3)
document how they went through the legal research process, what they found, and
why they chose the sources they did 4) tie it all into a legal analysis memo
and 5) document the cost and time it took them to complete the entire project
of legal research. At different points during the project, they need to apply
all three times of thinking:
- Critical = when they analyze and evaluate the current case law and statutes
- Creative =when they need to give me their analysis as well as predict what might happen based on what they found OR tell me what else they need to know to proceed
- Practical = throughout the legal research process that they must document to justify what they are doing as they research the issue
What important skills do students need to gain?
- Understand that in many (but not all) cases, there is almost always some type of research/commentary about almost every legal issue they can turn to, and that following a legal research process will almost always help them find material
- Hopefully, by the time they’ve finished the final assignment/exam, they’ve learned how to manage both a complex legal research assignment AND time management (Very often, the final assignment is due right before the rest of their first semester, first year legal research final exams start)
Integration Goals
The teaching pedagogy for
the course includes an overall theme where we constantly hammer the idea that
legal research is a process that helps students build the foundations to
becoming effective advocates for their client. We also tie some of the
exercises/problems to other material they are covering in other courses in
their first year curriculum (we often consult with the other first year
faculty), to connect everything overall to what they must eventually do as
future lawyers. For example, when they cover a particular type of crime in
criminal law, some of us might do a mini exercise where they’ll need to find
out how the definition of that crime has evolved over the years, or commentary
from other sources about that type of crime.
Human Dimensions Goals
As I’ve gotten more
experience teaching, I find a lot of what I want to do is connect each student
to learning the material in the way that is optimal for them, and that will
help them retain it. Every week I also have them work in teams, and I try to
mix them up every once in awhile so they don’t become too reliant on just one
or two other people. Luckily, normal practice throughout the first year
curriculum is to have the students work in small groups in their classes, so
they all tend to buy into it. There’s no way around it -- legal research can be
boring –but I try to emphasize to students that by learning efficient legal
research methods helps them become better attorneys in the long run. These
days, I spend more time explaining how the different roads they take in their
research can hinder/help their client, and to remember why they must
slog through all the potentially “boring” stuff.
Caring Goals
I always hope that by the
time they leave my class they learn:
- law librarian can be a great “go to” source no matter where they go to practice
- efficient legal research processes can help them become better attorneys
- that at the end of the day, a real person is paying for them to do the legal research on their behalf – they have a responsibility to do it right, and to do it well
- Something very loosely termed by my colleagues and I as the “15 minute rule” – if a student can’t find something legally relevant within a reasonable time period (in their first year of law school, it’s probably after about 15 minutes, given the normal stuff they need to research), they need to stop and step back. Chances are they are using the wrong terms to access the material, or accessing the wrong types of material for what they’re doing.
- This ties back into a “caring goal” very bluntly: I don’t want them wasting time, either in law school or for a future client – spinning wheels endlessly when if they just checked back in with a supervisor (or me) for a few minutes, they could be back on the right track. Very often, very smart people (like law students) are reluctant to admit they’re lost or don’t know what they’re doing. Law school is difficult enough – I tell them not to make it harder by hesitating to reach out, and that there’s nothing “wrong” with that in law school. Law school is where they’re supposed to make mistakes, ask lots of questions, and get their teachers to help them learn material. No one becomes an expert anything overnight, nor do you become really great at legal research/legal analysis until you’ve done it for years.
"Learning-How-to-Learn" Goals
I hope they become
comfortable with at least one major electronic legal research system, and that
they understand that very often, there is a lot of material to draw upon when
they need to analyze a legal issue.
Students need to
understand that a basic legal research process translates across ALL areas of
substantive law, and that it can serve them well once they understand all the
different pieces that create the legal research framework that most attorneys
work within in their practice.
That as they become more
proficient in a particular subject area, that they’ll be able to skip over many
of the beginning steps of the legal research process we teach them, but can
fall back on it when needed with any new area of law.
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