The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson once observed that if you wish to understand a culture, study its nurseries. There is a similar principle for the understanding of professions: if you wish to understand why professions develop as they do, study their nurseries, in this case, their forms of professional preparation. When you do, you will generally detect the characteristic forms of teaching and learning that I have come to call signature pedagogies. These are types of teaching that organize the fundamental ways in which future practitioners are educated for their new professions.1 For Shulman ..read more

One of the initiatives I’ve been working on in the last 20 years is the Simulated Client Initiative. I’ve worked with a range of partners to establish SC projects internationally. I’ve also organised international workshops in London (Gray’s Inn), Canberra (ANU College of Law) and Toronto, which were liveblogged in this blog This month, people attending back-to-back international conferences in Amsterdam on legal ethics and clinical education have the opportunity to attend an afternoon workshop on SCs, entitled ‘Improving Client Relationship Skills’, held on Saturday 20 July – draft agend ..read more

It was billed in the conference programme as the launch of the BILETA online teaching policy. But the document is more subtle and radical than this: a BILETA manifesto; not teaching-focused but learning-centred; not just online but education in the round. Why a manifesto, why now? There was a feeling that post-pandemic, with the drift back to f2f classes (aka go-backery, or Donald Schon’s ‘dynamic conservatism’), we needed a statement of what we had learned, where we were going with edtech. And so four academics associated with BILETA were commissioned to write a statement, which they rightly ..read more

Four papers. First up, Nick Scharf from East Anglia U, on an intriguing interdisciplinary topic: ‘Give the Drummer Some: Reflecting on the use of the drum kit to enhance student learning of copyright law’. As he describes it in his abstract ‘The approach outlined here breaks from the traditional question/answer/discussion structure of seminars and allows the students to be involved in a hands-on way to develop and enhance their understanding of copyright law.’ It also made for an absorbing and entertaining presentation that started out with kindergarten – ‘If you can count to four, you can pla ..read more

I’m at the two-day BILETA 2024 annual conference, held this year in Dublin, hosted by Dublin City University’s School of Law and Government. As an Honorary Vice President of BILETA I was invited by the Executive to participate in a roundtable on the newly-minted policy document, ‘A manifesto for the post-pandemic university’. The document describes itself modestly as a summary of lessons learned from ‘teaching (law) during Covid-19’, but is actually much more than that. I won’t have time during the session to liveblog it, so I’ll describe it later, and my responses to it. Browsing the programm ..read more

Thanks to Alan Treleaven for sending me an interesting news item from the US National Center for State Courts (NCSC) that announced ‘the formation of an 18-month study committee that will examine the state of legal education and bar admission processes in the United States along with the decline in attorneys dedicating their careers to public interest and public sector practice.’ The Committee on Legal Education and Admissions Reform (CLEAR) aims to recommend to state supreme courts practical reforms to enhance legal education and diversify bar admission processes by June 2025. Their work will ..read more

To all three of my readers, apologies for my disappearance over the past year and more. Many things intervened, including job changes, illness, house moves ending up here on the Isle of Skye; the acquisition of a giant collie and a motorbike (more of which anon), the renewal of old acquaintances, Hannah Arendt, Adam Ferguson and others, and the appearance of some remarkable and uncomfortable new ones – GPT4 among them. So what’s new? I’m now working part-time. I’m with Osgoode Professional Development, working on multimedia for professional lawyers, curriculum design and forms of simulation fo ..read more

First, a word about the two sessions that weren’t recorded, namely the demo interview with Alexis Callen as lawyer and Dana Mohr as SC, and the panel: Alexis, Dana, Joan Rilling.  Alexis did exceptionally well as a 1L lawyer, and Dana was first rate at enacting the client, and then switching into feedback mode with Alexis.  Very good illustration of the power of the method in action.  The panel was an opportunity for our participants to ask student and SCs about their experiences, which worked well. And so to the wrap-up session, which was a lot more lively than I thought it mig ..read more

The final presentation of the workshop, from Erica Green and Angela Yenssen.  For background, see PREP.  Erica gave us a short overview of the PREP model (spiral learning, TELL > SHOW > PRACTICE > PERFORM > REFLECT > DEMONSTRATE). SCs were introduced throughout the 4 phases of the program thus: Phase 1: Foundation Modules LSIA Multimedia.  Students watch real lawyers interview simulated clients (good/bad performances) and are shown excerpts of the sim client feedback to the good and poor performances Phase 2: Foundation Workshops:  Students are introduced to ..read more

John was the initiator of this radical bar program (running since 2005) in New Hampshire, working with the Supreme Court of NH to produce what has been a sigificant innovation in US legal education.  The graduates of the program achieve admission to the New Hampshire bar based upon demonstrated mastery of practical legal skills and substantive legal knowledge. Students create electronic portfolios of their work and meet repeatedly with bar examiners in what is a two-year, rather than two-day, bar examination. It is the only bar examination in the United States that uses standardized clien ..read more