Teaching Law Practice Across the Curriculum
Session 6 Workshops

Friday, June 18, 2010 – 1:30-2:45 p.m.

[A] Getting a Grip: Frameworks for Assessing Instructional Mastery (Room 106)

Nelson P. Miller, Thomas M. Cooley Law School
Heather Garretson, Thomas M. Cooley Law School
Tonya Krause-Phelan, Thomas M. Cooley Law School

Are you concerned about new outcomes-based accreditation standards? You may find them satisfying. Law professors face varied input demands from many constituent interests. Shifting assessment from teaching to learning can help define and document both subtle and broad student success. Using patterned rubrics, workshop participants will complete exercises in guided discussion groups, to move from teaching-assessment frameworks to learning-assessment frameworks. The workshop?s goal is that participants identify constituent interests, curriculum aims, and broad learning outcomes, and then articulate them into frameworks for measuring and demonstrating instructional mastery from both input and outcomes perspectives.

[B] Herding Cats: How To Achieve Faculty Cooperation In Teaching Lawyering Skills Across The 1L Curriculum (Without Infringing On Academic Freedom) (Room 114)

Suzanne J. Schmitz, Southern Illinois University School of Law
R.J. Robertson, Jr., Southern Illinois University School of Law
Alice Noble-Allgire, Southern Illinois University School of Law

Participants will learn a model for integrating skills exercises and writing-across-the-curriculum assignments in traditional doctrinal 1L courses. In this model, each 1L professor designs an exercise that fits the course and coordinates with other 1L faculty, including Lawyering Skills faculty, to sequence exercises from basic IRAC to complicated multi-issue problems. Students receive formative feedback on each assignment as to their progression toward competency-based standards. Participants in this workshop will receive examples and discuss challenges and ways to overcome those challenges at their schools.

[C] Teaching Law Students Using SIMPLE (SIMulated Professional Learning Environment) (Room 102)

Deb Quentel, Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI)

Simulations are an effective, alternative method to traditional law school teaching and can achieve some of the teaching objectives and deficits noted in the Carnegie Report. A well-written simulation can hone a single skill, reinforce the mastery of a single concept or yield a more complex "capstone" learning experience for students. This workshop will introduce faculty to SIMPLE (SIMulated Professional Learning Environment), a software tool designed to allow faculty to create, asses and monitor a simulation for students. Working together we will focus on the hands-on and intellectual tasks necessary for the planning and initial development of a SIMPLE simulation.

[D] Modeling Success in Every Law School Class (Room 100)

Douglas Wm. Godfrey, Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology
Mary Rose Strubbe, Chicago-Kent College of Law, Illinois Institute of Technology

Learning theory research teaches that skills need to be demonstrated to students before they can master those skills. Medical schools have long operated under the rubric "see one, do one, teach one." Similarly, teaching practice skills across the curriculum is becoming more urgent for law schools in light of the Stuckey and Carnegie reports. Accordingly, each presenter will demonstrate a skill he or she views as vital to young lawyers that he or she has incorporated into a casebook course. We will then divide into breakout groups led by the presenters, with the goal that every participant in each group will identify a skill, and a method of teaching that skill, she can model in her class.