Arc of the Career

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Session Type: AALS Arc of Career Programs

Session Capacity: 160

Hotel: New York Hilton Midtown

Room: Gramercy East

Floor: Second Floor

Structured peer support and on-going professional education are helpful to the project of attracting, training, and sustaining faculty members engaged in the demanding project of teaching students to be responsible members of the legal profession. We will discuss and demonstrate how a model of professional development that we originally used for clinical teachers—Rounds About Teaching—can benefit the entire faculty. Rounds about Teaching is a training model that builds a community of teachers who participate in regular facilitated peer conversations built upon the experience of teaching. In rounds conversations teachers can tell stories about events in their classrooms, get ideas about what and how to teach, reflect with supportive colleagues about the relationship between what they did and what they wanted to teach, and plan for the future with the benefit of the insights of others. We have found that building a community of teachers around the project of teaching makes each of us more conscious and deliberate in connecting the decisions we make in all phases of our teaching to both our own pedagogical goals and overall curricular design.