Legal Research Pedagogy

One factor leading to decreased focus and motivation in online classes is the uncertainty many students feel in the virtual environment.  This uncertainty can arise from students never having taken an online class before, from having distractions at home that they don't have in their in-person classes, or from using technology with which they're not familiar.  This uncertainty can lead to students disengaging with the class, as they feel disconnected from the content, their instructor, and their classmates. To support students undergoing this uncertainty and help them stay engaged, provide as much clarity as possible.  Being clear about expectations will help students gain some balance in an uncomfortable situation.  There are a number of ways we can help students minimize their discomfort--from making sure online class modules are standardized in their format within the learning management system to designing a syllabus with well-structured, clear course requireme...

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 ...

Studies show that humans forget most of what they learn. But, students acquire new knowledge better when we keep a couple of things in mind: 1)        Students learn better when they have a clear understanding of why they are being expected to learn new tasks and information . As such, it is critical that we explain to students why we are teaching what we’re teaching. Tying curriculum back to practical application can help students understand the importance of what they are learning.  For those of us teaching legal research, this is vitally important. We have to tell students why being strong researchers is central to their ability to be efficient lawyers—that they will be spending approximately 35% of their time conducting legal research in their first few years of practice. We have to explain to them that research is an analytical skill that they must practice in context so they can learn to do this critical lawyering skill effectively. It’s also impo...

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...

We've seen an increased significance placed on formative assessment in the legal academy. Standard 314 of the ABA Standards requires that law schools use both formative and summative assessment methods in their curriculum. Its rational for doing so is "to measure and improve student learning and provide meaningful feedback to students." The ABA defines formative assessment methods as "measurements at different points during a particular course or at different points over the span of a student's education that provide meaningful feedback to improve student learning." Those of us in the legal research instruction business are no strangers to formative assessment. We are leaders in this in the law school curriculum, with rarely a class going by in which students do not practice their skills. Lately, though, I've been wondering whether I'm going about formative assessment in the way that will best provide meaningful feedback to students. In the mandato...