Do you hope your students will be justice-ready at the end of your semester together? Fearless problem solvers? Understand what it takes to be the best-prepared lawyer? Reflective learners? Once you, as a teacher, understand your goals for your students, you can construct an effective course to meet your vision. This workshop is targeted to clinical faculty who are ready to visualize what their students will have become (in skills, knowledge, and values) at the end of their course, and then how to build a clinic, field placement, or skills course to achieve that vision.
Consider our conference theme — Lawyering with Creativity and for Equity. The conference planners have encouraged us to focus on ways the clinical community can rethink both how we teach and how we practice, challenging some of our most fundamental and hidden biases. This workshop is designed with just that aim in mind. For experienced clinicians, our workshop enables them to retool their courses to better reach their aspirations for justice in learning environments. For less experienced clinicians, the workshop provides the platform to discover how the sundry parts of a course, well-synthesized and sequenced, can deliver deep student learning while simultaneously meeting broader goals of developing curricula that are more inclusive.
The workshop introduces a design process for creating an effective, intentionally designed instructional path for any experiential learning course. It will help each participant identify the animating theory for their course and think further about learning goals. We will also begin thinking about how to identify observable evidence that your students have mastered the goals you have set. The process can be particularly challenging as teachers shift from covering many laws, skills, and values to identifying one or two goals drawn from their animating theory about lawyering. But it is anchored in the mission to provide students with durable learning, as they can focus on the most essential content of the course and transfer that learning to different and more challenging contexts in their careers.
In summary, the workshop addresses how clinicians can examine exactly what learning they wish to facilitate for their students and how to authentically identify the student characteristics that will demonstrate that learning.