Teaching Executive Function as a Lawyering Skill in a Neurodiverse World

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Hotel: N/A

Room: Franciscan D

Floor: Ballroom Level

This session represents the culmination of a year-long collaboration of a neurodiverse group of clinic professors from five different institutions, along with interdisciplinary experts, who set out with the aim of introducing executive function as a lawyering skill in our clinic courses. After observing a pattern of fixed mindset narratives expressed by students struggling with executive function skills in both litigation and non-litigation clinics, we explored different forms of strengths-based, growth mindset approaches to teaching executive functioning as a set of lawyering skills. While each clinician collaborator designed a different clinic seminar class around developing these skills, we all did so with the intention of disrupting the assumption that often seems baked into traditional legal pedagogy: that, by the time students reach law school, their executive function skills are immutable. Our interdisciplinary experts from academic support and non-profit management provide innovative perspectives on these efforts, including unique tools and strategies for teaching and mentoring around executive function. In this AALS session, we hope to share why we believe it is important to teach executive function in clinic and what we have learned through both our development and implementation of individual class plans and our joint reflections on them.