Yesterday, I noted that I would start with a general discussion of the philosophies of our Academic Excellence Program (AEP). Here goes....
Due to our school’s recent bar pass rates, I’ve received inquiries asking what we’ve done to support students’ success. Did you give students more multiple-choice questions? More essays? Did you make courses more about black letter law? Did you tutor students? Did you implement a bar prep course that taught them everything they need to know on the bar? Did you teach them only the most highly tested subjects?
The answer to all these questions is “no,” but the questions themselves miss the point—like asking a Mergers & Acquisitions lawyer whether her achievements were due to taking more depos. Our pass rate doesn’t come from what we’ve done for our students; it comes from what we’ve taught them to do for themselves. I’ll explain after the jump….
First, I note at the outset that our bar pass rate is due to our faculty and our students. These elements are the core of any law school’s results.
In addition, our AEP intentionally employs certain specific methods. But these methods are well outside the orthodoxy in terms of measures usually adopted to improve students’ law school success and impact bar results. We don’t focus on how to change our teaching, how to reteach doctrine, or how to give students more of some supposed cure-all. We have not transformed into a “bar prep school.” Instead, we began teaching students how to teach themselves.
Much of the current thinking about law school pedagogy is paternalistic. How can we change the curriculum? What can we do to control students’ learning better? How can we spoon-feed doctrine so that we can save students from failure? The reality is that students need to succeed on their own measure. We’re not in the exam room with them; we’re not in a motion hearing with them. So, our program uses educational psychology and cognitive science to give students the tools to thrive academically.
The problem is that these tools feel counterintuitive, and they are outside the norm of law student study methods. Since high school, students have been sold a false bill of goods: Diligent students supposedly read ahead and highlight furiously; good students allegedly acquire an outline and reread it over and over; top-achieving students purportedly game their professors by sticking solely to the study methods handed down by lore and anecdote; “studying” is the epicenter of grades. Rowing against this well-engrained tide makes it hard to convince students of the benefits of our unconventional methods.
But empirical studies demonstrate that the orthodox methods defy everything we know from science about how the brain acquires knowledge and develops analytical skills. Rereading is one of the worst ways to encode memory, yet tradition dictates that students study for exams and the bar by reading outlines endlessly. Following another person’s dictates on learning outsources the regulation of that learning and kills the crucial skill of metacognition, yet students blindly follow syllabi and bar prep courses’ one-size-fits-all programs. Relying solely on lectures prevents students from building their own cognitive schema, yet students spend weeks having their minds wired externally. Failing to leverage spaced repetition and forced recall practice makes learning far less effective and efficient, yet many students don’t start testing themselves, if at all, until just days before finals or the bar exam.
Our program teaches our students, from day one of law school, how to make more effective learning methods the centerpiece of their studies. Not everyone buys in, but enough do to make a difference.
The increased use of new pedagogies in legal education is progress, but that progress is a necessary but insufficient condition for improvement. The academy also needs to think less about engineering short-term results using orthodox methods and more about producing life-long students of the law by empowering their use of the science of learning. Asking what our students can do for themselves requires us to cede to them the autonomy of learning so that they can control their own development and forge their own success.
More details to follow….
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