By Mary Kay Kane

This summer two AALS conferences took place that focused both broadly and deeply on teaching and scholarship. The first was the May Workshop on Clinical Legal Education, which was entitled ?Expanding Visions of Scholarship: Making It Happen,? and the second was the June Conference on New Ideas for Experienced Teachers, which was entitled ?We Teach, But Do They Learn.? These meetings are excellent models for the kinds of institutional dialogues that I encouraged when I announced my theme for the year of ?Recommitting to Teaching and Scholarship.? Thus, I thought I would take the opportunity here to share with you some of the extremely interesting ideas that were exchanged, in the hope that this may spur others who were not able to be there, or may not know someone who was, to pursue these areas further?to keep the dialogue going.

Let me begin by noting that, although both of these meetings had the advantage of several days to allow them to explore a wide array of issues and to utilize several formats in doing so, a review of the kinds of matters explored shows that several of their components could readily serve as separate free-standing discussions, either at future Section programs during the AALS Annual Meeting, or possibly as faculty workshops or the like at individual law schools over the course of the academic year. Even more ambitious, one of my colleagues who was at one of these meetings and returned very enthused, suggested that perhaps in metropolitan areas with more than one law school, a few could join together to put on an all-Saturday program in which they exchanged ideas and techniques on some of the materials on which the conferences centered. But even if that seems a bit too elaborate, I hope that each of you will find in this brief description at least some kernel that will encourage you to explore further, in whatever fashion you deem appropriate.

Turning first to the Clinical Scholarship Workshop, the program for this four-day meeting covered a wide range of issues. As is emblematic of clinical legal education, the discussion of the scholarship in the field was broadly inclusive of what constitutes scholarship, ranging from how to turn curricular innovations into scholarship to substantive sessions on scholarship for criminal social justice, an examination of race-linked scholarship, and feminist clinical scholarship. Also included were interactive sessions designed to help new scholars develop their own voices; a look at empirical research and how it can enhance the teaching of legal skills, as well as how to turn interesting research questions into empirical research; and consideration of the benefits of collaboration in scholarship, including collaboration with other disciplines, practicing lawyers, other law school faculty, and students. Many of these sessions were concurrent, allowing a broad array of different perspectives and issues to be explored in a short time-span and allowing those attending to decide for themselves what issues they wanted to learn more about. There was something to pique everyone?s interest.

In addition to the sessions on what types of scholarship exist and how one can do them successfully, the workshop had several plenary discussions tackling difficult questions. These included an opening session on the very question of why scholarship is important for clinicians to do. This session was counterbalanced by another that explored whether focusing on scholarship necessarily takes away from what clinics were originally intended to do, by interfering with their prime purpose of teaching and advocacy and detracting from the social welfare goals that motivate most clinicians. Another topic considered was what was described as the clinicians ?love-hate? relationship with ?traditional? scholarship. The ethics of clinical scholarship that rests on telling stories about cases and clients also was explored in yet another session.

Although the preceding description only scratches the surface and does not attempt capture the substance of what was discussed, it does suggest an array of exciting topics on scholarship that faculty in other fields might think of investigating in other fora. And the tension between teaching and scholarship and how and why it is important for both to be actively pursued by all of us are issues that cross all fields and require our serious consideration.

Turning to the New Ideas for Experienced Teachers Conference, that built upon the growing literature that is focused on teaching and student learning. It examined how that scholarship could or should influence the ways in which we plan our courses, structure our material, select appropriate teaching techniques, guide individual students in their learning, and ultimately evaluate student learning both during our courses and at their close. Ideas and techniques of how technology could be used to enhance learning were shared (and demonstrated) as well.

Thus, the entire focus of the four days was to bring what for most participants was new knowledge from other disciplines to bear on what we do. Thanks to a grant from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, we were able to invite Professor John D. Bransford, the Centennial Professor of Psychology and Education at Vanderbilt University, a national expert on learning theory, and the co-editor of a recent National Research Council Publication, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, (which can be found on the Web at http://books.nap.edu/books/0309070368/html/) not only to be the lead speaker and present some of the fundamental findings of that study, but also to be with us throughout the conference. He actively critiqued the ideas and models being discussed, explaining how or why they did or did not respond to what is now known about the learning process. That kind of extremely knowledgeable outside critique of what are sometimes our insular views was extremely helpful, as well as serving as a catalyst for discussion and debate among the participants. It was an excellent model for interactive learning and resulted in continuous exchanges both inside and outside the formal sessions.

Although it would be impossible to capture the depth and scope of the discussions that were carried on over the four-day conference, I want to highlight the three broad themes that were explored. The first focused on the fact that all students come to the classrooms with strong preconceptions about the material they are going to study. Most of these preconceptions are deeply embedded and a result of their backgrounds and therefore they are different for different students. The challenge thus becomes how to develop strategies for determining how your students are looking at the material and how that may impede their understanding of it. Examples were shared of how preconceptions operate as a barrier to understanding and discussions followed about techniques for faculty to identify some of these preconceptions, including the problems of doing so in large classes.

The second theme rested on the concept that effective lawyering is problem-solving and that problem-solving requires what learning theorists refer to as ?deep understanding,? which, while it must be tied to content knowledge, is much more. It entails a conceptual structure and clear models for using the information that students learn in an appropriate way. (In time-honored law-school terms, ?how to think like a lawyer?!) Here learning theory suggests that the way in which a course is structured and taught is critical to enhancing that deep understanding and should require us to focus not simply on course coverage, but on mechanisms to teach students how to prioritize and organize the information in meaningful and useful ways. In addition to exploring what some of those mechanisms might be, including how technology might help, that conclusion spurred a not surprising debate about the pressures in law schools today on course coverage for bar exam purposes versus analytical problem solving and how or whether these theories are applicable for students who come to law school with varying abilities and experiences, including how such approaches should or could relate to ?at risk? students.

Finally, the third theme focused on what is called ?metacognition.? Stated simply, metacognition is the ability to be aware of our own learning processes and what we do or do not know. Learning theorists have concluded that those people who develop that ability are much more effective learners. Given that we often assert that to enter the legal profession is to embrace lifelong learning, it then becomes critical for us to help our students develop metacognition so that when they are out on their own they will be well-positioned to be effective life-long learners. The question becomes how we can get our students be become self-conscious about their learning so that they naturally engage in self-assessment and thus learn on their own. Law faculty speakers appeared to agree that we probably are weakest in this last stage of learning since our ?assessment? of our students, which could be the model for them developing their own, occurs so infrequently and often without the kind of feedback necessary to allow them to learn much from the assessment itself?except their relative standing among their classmates. The question becomes what other or additional assessment methods make sense and are realistic to expect law faculty to adopt.

While some of these ideas about learning may appear quite abstract, they become quite concrete when discussed in the context of trying to plan a particular course, or even a particular subset of material in a course. Consequently, as was done at the conference, a potentially useful way to begin to think about these themes is to take a particular topic in a course and to discuss with colleagues in the field how you might structure the classes involving that topic to achieve these goals. Whether done informally with fellow teachers at your own school or more formally as a topic at one of the Section meetings during the Annual Meeting, I can assure you that you will have a lively and enlightening discussion.

Although the conference produced several ideas for means to improve in all three of the areas just identified, no ?magic bullet? was presented. Nor were there clear answers to the some of the tensions presented in making major changes in our classrooms in order to enhance learning there. These are all matters that will be with us for some time to come. The purpose of the conference and this report, however, is merely to start us thinking about them so that, as we plan our courses, we can be in a position to take advantage of the store of findings and knowledge that is being assembled about teaching. In order to promote that objective to an audience broader than those who were able to attend, the materials for the conference, including a very helpful bibliography published by Professor Gerry Hess and his Institute for Law School Teaching at Gonzaga, are available through the AALS website for anyone to find out more. Simply type www.aals.org and then click on ?Workshops and Conferences? and ?Conference on New Ideas?.

* This article appeared in the August 2001 AALS Newsletter