Why Attend?
The current challenges facing legal education include increasing diversity, sustaining student enrollment, preparing students to practice law effectively, ensuring strong bar passage, complying with evolving ABA accreditation standards, enhancing student learning for this generation, measuring learning outcomes, and providing an overall educational experience that engage students and motivates them to become excellent lawyers and generous alumni. We encourage deans, faculty members, and senior administrators to attend this special workshop to learn how Academic Support principles and programs can help law schools meet a number of their strategic goals.
Law school academic support programs were initially charged with supporting access-admission students to increase diversity and help ensure their success. Today, ASPs have evolved and now assume a variety of forms to provide a range of services for all students, including providing intense intervention for the academically at-risk students. The ASP mission has also expanded from providing programs that help students transition into the first year of law school to include programs that provide specific interventions in upper-level courses and support bar passage. In some schools, ASPs are also a resource for faculty members who want to innovate inside and outside the classroom. Consequently, ASPs can be a center for effective, creative teaching and learning as schools seek to support pedagogy development.
As a group, ASP professionals have experimented with and developed particular pedagogical strategies that support student learning and enable all levels of students to reach their potential. During this day-long workshop, our goal is to explore what law schools can learn from ASP and how we, as educators, can best maximize these programs as we continue to improve upon the curriculum, pedagogy, and law school environment to produce effective, ethical, and engaged lawyers.