Legal Research Pedagogy

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...

The challenge of being an excellent teacher stems from the necessity of having to be an expert in two areas, one’s subject specialty and the craft of educating. For law librarians who instruct, this means first being an expert in using constantly-evolving legal research databases, not to mention those newly developed resources that we must quickly learn to use, and in the analytical process inherent to legal research. Staying fully abreast of changes to the huge volume of legal materials could alone be a full-time job. When combined with efficiently and effectively serving our patrons, engaging in collection development, and doing any of the other dozens of tasks that librarians undertake on a daily basis, it becomes easy to see why finding the time to hone our craft as teachers would be difficult. Despite these challenges, it's critical that we make time to do so. As one scholar explains, Really good teachers who want to preserve their skills and get better over time have ...

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...

In our respective law schools, we don't always have control over the amount of mandatory research instruction our students receive and who is doing that instruction. As such, to ensure that our students have the research skills they need for practice, librarians must use their creativity to come up with instructional opportunities for our students. There are so many iterations of non-credit legal research programs out there. Law librarians run certificate programs for students on legal research, run lunchtime brown bags on how to conduct topical research, partner with vendors to provide programming to benefit their students, hold quick Peanut Butter & Jelly and a Demo sessions highlighting a single resource, and much more. Sometimes it takes multiple iterations of an idea to work. This means that we need to hesitate before discouraging a colleague who wants to try something, even if we've tried something similar before. It often takes the right team and spark of energy fo...

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...

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...