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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 …

Teaching With Emotion: Enriching The Educational Experience Of First-Year Law Students, Grant H. Morris

Grant H Morris

Through the case method and Socratic dialogue, first year law students are taught to develop critical legal analytic skills–to “think like a lawyer.” Those skills, however, are primarily, if not entirely, intellectual. This article discusses the need to address emotional issues in educating law students. Unlike other articles, my article does not merely urge professors to raise such issues in their classes and discuss them analytically. Rather, I want students to actually experience emotion in the classroom setting as they discuss various fact situations and the legal principles involved in the resolution of disputes involving those facts. Law students need …

One L Revisited: Tales From The Back Bench, Robert R.M. Verchick

Robert R.M. Verchick

My move to Harvard Law was an exciting, but sometimes frustrating transition. The law school community was large and anonymous, the famous Bauhaus dormitories (designed by Walter Gropius) part Habitrail and part shoebox factory, the eyes of campus administrators a baleful gray. I had come with a bachelor's degree in English (English!) from a west coast univer-sity that called itself “the Farm,” a campus known for fragrant eucalyptus and a pride of lion-colored hills. Harvard Law was certainly no “Farm,” and to my eye it was no “Hundred-Acre Wood” either. Whimsy? Forget it. . . .