Skip to main content

Letter to A First-Time (Legal Research) Instructor

Dear Friend,

Seven years ago this week, I was prepping madly to teach my first legal research class.  Three months earlier, I'd been a law student myself.  To say that I was nervous is an understatement; mildly terrified was probably a more apt description.  The truth is I didn't really know what I was getting myself into, but I knew that I wanted to teach legal research differently than I had been taught legal research, where at best it was viewed as a skill less important than everything else being taught at law school and at worst an afterthought, a skill that students should be able to do with very little training. 

There are many points I wish I knew then that I know now and that's what I want to share with you today. 


First and foremost, students will forgive many imperfections in the classroom if they know you care about their learning.  At the start of every semester, I re-read Kent Syverud's "Taking Students Seriously: A Guide for New Law Teachers," 43 J. Legal Educ. 247 (1993), recommended to me by Professor Susan Kuo, a colleague at the University of South Carolina School of Law, early in my career.  Syverud gives three propositions about teaching, which have all proved true in my experience:
    • "Your students will know whether you like and respect them, and if they know that you do not, you will fail as a teacher."[1]
    • "If your students know that you like and respect them, they will forgive a great deal in the classroom."[2]
    • "If your students know that you like and respect them, they will come to you for as much advice and support as you have the time and energy to provide."[3]
Caring can be shown in any number of ways, no matter how introverted or extroverted you might be, including setting clear expectations, showing some empathy to the challenges inherent to being a law student, being accessible for questions and concerns students might have, or sharing your own excitement for your subject matter.

Second, it's okay not to know everything; you know enough or you wouldn't be the one at the front of the class.  Imposter syndrome in the classroom is no joke.  Most of us feel it at one point or another (I would even go to so far as to say that if you do feel it, you're probably doing something right).  But you were hired for your expertise and are there because you have knowledge that you can share with your students.

That being said, it's absolutely okay to say you don't know the answer to a question and it actually models to students that it's normal not to have all the answers--something many law students struggle with.  After class, find the answer to share in the next meeting.  Your students will appreciate your forthrightness and your humanity.

Third, knowing enough isn't enough to make you a good teacher.  Even with all the expertise in the world, it takes work to be a good teacher, a person who is able to help another person gain expertise in that area.  In fact, studies show that experts oftentimes have a difficult time teaching novices because our brains can make leaps that the novice learner's brain cannot.  To be a good teacher, you have to put some thought into how learners learn--and not rely just on how information was conveyed when you were the learner.  Ask yourself how you can help your students retain their learning long-term, how you can engage them, and how you can support them in their learning. Sure, it can be scary to try new things in the classroom, but keep in mind that first and most important point--that as long as students can tell that you care about their learning, they'll going to forgive a learning strategy that may fall flat in its first iteration.

Fourth, you're not alone.  We all start somewhere and as long as you're dedicating time and space to working on becoming the best teacher you can be, you're doing something right. Additionally, there's a network of law school professors who care and thinking deeply about their teaching and who are dedicated to moving legal education toward a curricular model centered around helping students learn.  No doubt there are also some in your law school building.  Find those folks, share ideas, learn from them, and thank them.  

I know you can do this, even if you're mildly terrified like I was once upon a time.


[1] Kent D. Syverud, Taking Students Seriously: A Guide for New Law Teachers, 43 J. Legal Educ. 247, 247 (1993).

[2] Id. at 248.

[3] Id.


Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Why Experts Can Struggle to Teach Novices

This week in our Slack group on teaching , there was an interesting discussion about expertise and the amount of time needed to prep for instruction. I mentioned something that I recalled reading: that experts can be less effective in teaching novices because often the expert skips cognitive steps that the novice learner needs to understand.  I thought I'd dig into this a little more today on the blog. The fact is novices and experts learn very differently.  The major reason for this is that experts not only know a lot about their chosen discipline, but they understand how that discipline is organized. As such, what has a clear structure to the expert is a jumbled set of unorganized information to the novice.  The information presented to novices "are more or less random data points."[1]  In contrast, when the expert learns something new in her area of expertise, she just plugs it into the knowledge structure that already exists in her long-term memory. Because the...
Read more

Research Conferences as a Practice Skill

Many first year legal research and writing include a conferencing component. Most of these conferences, however, focus primarily on the writing process. Conferences are held after students have struggled through the research process and have drafted at least some part of a memo or brief. There are many pedagogical reasons for the importance of research conferences (e.g. students are provided with individualized feedback), but one that is often overlooked is that research conferences help prepare students for practice by giving them opportunities to collaborate with other legal professionals and to orally communicate about the legal issues they are facing. Through research conferences, students learn how to discuss the authorities they have located effectively and to communicate how they are relevant to the legal issues they are facing. This practice collaborating is key. As Susan Azyndar noted in her article " Work with Me Here: Collaborative Learning in the Legal Research Class...
Read more

Helping With Student Focus & Motivation in the Remote Classroom, Part 3: Limiting New Technologies to Reduce Extrinsic Cognitive Load

A librarian colleague used to say to me, "Technology is great until it's not." This couldn't be more true in the classroom.  As many of us prepare for a fall entirely or partially online, there's a rush to familiarize ourselves with lots of new educational technology to teach our classes. There's this sense that if you're not using the best and newest ed tech in your class, you're doing something wrong. Fortunately, the science doesn't back this up.  Using too many different types of technology can be a contributing factor to cognitive overload in students . Cognitive load is a term cognitive psychologists use to describe the mental challenge that the limitations of working memory puts on a student's learning.[1] Basically, working memory is extremely limited in both time and duration. Humans can only hold on to between four and nine "chunks" of information at any given time,[2] and can only hold on to new information in their worki...
Read more

The Experiential Simulation Course Checklist, Part 1

When developing courses to meet the requirements for experiential simulation courses, there are three ABA standards that come into play: Standard 303(a)(3), Standard 302, and Standard 304. When combined, there are eight bullet points that one must meet to comply with the standards for experiential simulation courses**: " Primarily experiential in nature " (Standard 303(a)(3)):  To meet this bullet point, an ABA Guidance Memo provides additional help. It notes that the "primarily" suggests "more than simply inserting an experiential component into an existing class." Furthermore, the "primarily" "indicates the main purpose of something." It is clear that the experiential nature of the course should be central to the course's design and should be prevalent across the entire length of the course. In fact, the ABA notes that the "experiential nature of the course should . . . be the organizing principle of the course, and th...
Read more

Using Backward Design in Course Development

There are different methods instructors use to design their courses. In his book Creating Significant Learning Experiences , L. Dee Fink identifies three major approaches: In the first approach, the instructor picks out some number of major topics within their course subject matter, then preps lectures for each topic. Then he or she adds in a final exam and sometimes a midterm, and the course is ready to go.  Fink notes that this approach is less time-consuming, but "pays little or no attention to the quality and quantity of student learning." [1] He explains that this type of learning "has a relatively short half-life and, more significantly, does not meet the educational needs of students and society today." [2] In the second approach, instructors still designs their course around major topics, but rather than focusing solely on lectures, he or she incorporates a variety of active learning opportunities. This approach is more engaging for students, but it still...
Read more