Legal Research Pedagogy

Lecturing has a bad name in today's world of experiential learning, but it's an often necessary component to legal research classes as students have to have some bibliographic information before we jump into the databases. As I conclude one semester and begin prepping for the next, I've been doing a lot of reading on how I can make my lectures more effective and engaging learning experiences for my students. As Todd Zakrajsek notes in his 2017 Teaching in Higher Ed podcast on Dynamic Lecturing , "You can't just take bad examples of something and claim that the whole concept is bad." Instead, we should focus on what makes a lecture compelling for our students in our course planning and evaluate our lectures after our classes for their efficacy, reflecting on what worked well and what didn't. So how can we make the most of our lectures?  Here's a few ideas I've come across: Make your objectives clear to your students . Don't hide the ball--...

Reflection is a critical component of experiential learning.  We see in ABA Standard 303 that experiential courses must include multiple opportunities for self-evaluation.  Self-evaluation is critically important to legal research.  Students must reflect on and assess their research methodology each time they research to continue becoming more efficient legal researchers and to determine what research strategies work best in which situations. [1] Reflection relates to several ideas found in cognitive theory that have been shown to result in stronger learning and retention: Retrieval : recalling recently-learned information;  Elaboration : finding a nexis between what you know and what you are learning; and  Generation : putting concepts into your own words and/or contemplating what you might do differently next time. I've been contemplating how to better incorporate reflection into legal research classes. At the beginning of this semester, at the recom...

I hear from a number of my fellow law librarians that they don't like doing research conferences with their students. The number one reason I hear for why is that they take up a tremendous amount of time--which is completely fair, given time is a commodity most law librarians are short on. For me, the benefits of research conferences far outweigh the time needed to perform them. Here are just a few reasons why I include them in my research courses: 1.  As I've already noted elsewhere , they are a great way for instructors to model for their students how to collaborate and communicate in a way similar to what they'll do in practice. Conferencing is a lawyering skill that students need to practice during their legal education. 2.  Individualized feedback is critical to student learning (and it's required under the ABA Standards for experiential simulation courses ).  Research conferences allow us to provide feedback in an atmosphere that all but guarantees that our ...

In Part I of this post series , I broke down the requirements of the experiential simulations under Standards 303(a)(3) and 304. The majority of the bullet points in the checklist (multiple opportunities for performance, feedback from a faculty member, opportunities for self-evaluation, etc.) can be fairly easily met, especially in research courses, where frequent opportunities to practice various skills and getting feedback from the instructor are common features. The more challenging aspect of meeting these requirements comes in balancing the "primarily experiential in nature" requirement with the "classroom instruction component." Since ABA has described the "primarily" in "primarily experiential in nature" to "indicate the main purpose of something," this suggests that the practice of skills should be a major component of the course. This means that too much lecture leans away from the class being experiential in nature. After a...

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...