Education Commons^™

A Message From Your Body: Dream The Answer, Jalae Ulicki

Jalae Ulicki

The Birth Of A New Teaching Idea.Pdf, Jalae Ulicki

Jalae Ulicki

Crowdsourced Coursebooks, Stephen E. Henderson, Joseph T. Thai

Stephen E Henderson

Given increasing criticism and dropping admissions, American legal education is likely to change, hopefully reversing the unsustainable trend of increasing expense without increasing value. Much debate focuses on restructuring the curriculum to make it more “practical” and skills-infused; here we instead propose a rethinking of the basic unit of law teaching, the casebook. Casebook authors and publishers are cautiously venturing into electronic editions, but they fail to harness the power of social learning to make textbooks dramatically smarter as well as cheaper. Working with a technology startup, we are developing an online platform that reinvents both authorship and learning. The …

Getting Real About Globalization And Legal Education: Potential And Perspectives For The U.S., Carole Silver

Carole Silver

This article addresses whether US law schools are preparing their JD students to work in the global environment that many - if not most – law graduates will encounter. It begins by considering the significance of globalization for legal education, drawing on research analyzing its influence on legal practice as well as on higher education. It then explores possible settings and opportunities for learning to work in a global environment. For the vast majority of students whose learning must occur in the US, the presence of international students in their law school offers the potential for creating a global learning …

Answering Legal Problem Questions In A Grid Format, Alex Steel, Dominic Fitzsimmons

Alex Steel

The development of legal reasoning skills is a fundamental aspect of legal education. What has sometimes been called “learning to think like a lawyer” is a threshold competency that students must acquire before they can progress to more complex analysis of broader legal issues. This chapter discusses the use of problem-based scenarios to both engage students and to develop legal analysis. It outlines the threshold difficulties students must overcome in order to read texts as a lawyer and explains how use of a grid format answer – rather than an essay format – can both assist students to overcome these …

Thinking Like Thinkers: Is The Art And Discipline Of An "Attitude Of Suspended Conclusion" Lost On Lawyers?, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

In his 1910 book, How We Think, John Dewey proclaimed that “the most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquainting the attitude of suspended conclusion. . .” This Article explores that insight and describes its meaning and significance in the enterprise of thinking generally and its importance in law school education specifically. It posits that the law would be best served if lawyers think like thinkers and adopt an attitude of suspended conclusion in their problem solving affairs. Only when conclusion is suspended is there space for the exploration of the subject at hand. The …

The Variable Value Of Us Legal Education In The Global Legal Services Market, Carole Silver

Carole Silver

Many U.S. law firms now claim to be global organizations, and they seek to occupy the same high status everywhere they work. In part, simply supporting overseas offices is an indication of status for U.S.-based firms. But firms want more than this and they strive for recognition as elite advisors around the world. In this pursuit, have firms identified a set of common characteristics and credentials that define a “global lawyer?” That is, is there a uniform and universal profile, or perhaps a set of assets that comprise global professional capital, which are emerging as the indicia of credibility and …

Let's Focus On Forms For Teaching, Jalae Ulicki

Jalae Ulicki

Is Our Students Learning?: Using Assessments To Measure And Improve Law School Learning, Rogelio Lasso

Rogelio A. Lasso

Is Our Students Learning?: Using Assessments to Measure and Improve Law School Learning

Using Assessments to Improve Student Performance

Rogelio A. Lasso

The primary role of a law school is to make sure students learn skills to become competent lawyers. Learning is a loop in which the teacher facilitates learning, students perform tasks to show what they have learned, the teacher assesses and provides feedback on students’ performance, and students use the feedback to improve their learning skills for the next learning task. Teacher assessment feedback is critical to student learning. Prompt and frequent feedback allows students to take control …

The Bologna Process And Its Impact In Europe: It's So Much More Than Degree Changes, Laurel S. Terry

Laurel S. Terry

The Bologna Process is a massive, multi-year project designed to create the European Higher Education Area by the year 2010. It began approximately ten years ago when four European Union (EU) countries signed a relatively vague declaration. It has now grown to forty-six countries, including all of the EU Member States and nineteen non-EU countries. The Bologna Process countries have agreed on ten action lines for restructuring European higher education. These action lines are nothing short of revolutionary - they address everything from adoption of a three-cycle degree system (e.g., bachelor-master's-doctorate degrees), European-wide quality assurance efforts, mobility of higher education …