- Browse by Subject
Browsing by Subject "law students"
Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Early Identification & Intervention: Is There “Hope” for At-Risk Law Students?(Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2014-04-11) Martin, Allison D.; Rand, Kevin L.Psychologists have defined hope as a cognitive style involving how people think about pursuing goals. Research by Snyder and colleagues has shown that hope predicts academic performance and psychological well-being among undergraduate students. Consistent with these findings, our prospective study of hope, optimism, academic performance, and psychological well-being in law students showed that hope predicted academic performance in the first semester of law school above and beyond previous academic achievement. Moreover, hope predicted life satisfaction during the last week of the semester. Thus, assessing for low hope in those entering law school may help to identify students at risk for academic underperformance and psychological maladjustment. Once low-hope students have been identified, legal educators can intervene by employing five strategies for engendering hope: (A) optimizing student goals; (B) increasing student autonomy; (C) modeling the learning process; (D) helping students understand evaluation as feedback; and (E) modeling agency. These strategies, derived from Snyder’s hope theory, are grounded in contemporary teaching and learning theories and are consistent with principles discussed in Best Practices for Legal Education. By identifying low-hope students early and intervening to improve their hope, legal educators may be able to improve their academic performance, enhance their life satisfaction, increase their bar passage rates, and, eventually, build a happier and more competent generation of lawyers.Item Establishing community collaborations in Marion County: Benefits and challenges(Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2015-04-17) Boys, StephanieThe co-presenters direct an innovative experiential learning experience for law and social work students in which they provide legal and social services for low-income Marion county residents. Students are exposed to a variety of situations in which they interact with residents in our community. As the class examines these experiences, a few questions emerge – what is our community? How do we define community? What does our involvement consist of, and why? What limitations exist for us interacting with our community? The session poster will explore collected data over the two semesters this new clinic has been offered. Data presented will include who is in our community, how do we determine who is in our community, and why are some excluded? How do class, power, agency affiliation and court contact/interaction affect who makes up our community? What are the values that underlie decisions we make to engage with some community organizations or courts over others? How then do we resolve conflicts with courts and partner agencies when differences arise over the best options for our clients and/or our students? What decision making goes into picking a reliable community partner? The research will be presented in a way to spark interdisciplinary conversations with session attendees.Item Progress through partnership: Providing Holistic Services VIA SERVICE LEARNING to Benefit Students, the University and the Community(Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2014-04-11) Hagan, Carrie A.; Boys, Stephanie K.In 2012, the presenters developed a new service learning opportunity through an interdisciplinary partnership between the schools of Law and Social Work. The purpose of the project was to enhance the joint JD/MSW program, as well as the experiences of JD and MSW students respectively. The presenters redesigned a Civil Practice Clinic, which had formerly involved only law students, to now pair law students and social work students in order to serve the holistic needs of clients. Referrals for the clinic are obtained through a variety of partner referrals. All of the clinic’s clients do not have the resources to retain legal counsel or services by other means. The law students address the clients’ legal issues and the social work students ensure the clients are connected with appropriate social services, such as domestic violence counseling and social welfare benefits. The teamwork between students increases law students’ aptitude in client-centered lawyering, and familiarizes social work students with the legal rights and resources available to clients. The presenters have adapted pedagogies of engagement, most notably through problem-based and peer-led interdisciplinary team teaching and learning. Students more effectively and efficiently serve community members in need of legal counsel and social services, resulting in a clinic that is beneficial for both students and community members. The partnership resulted after years of witnessing law students struggle with interpersonal skills how to handle client emotions (and a perceived inability to help connect to services) while social work students struggled with an awareness of the law, litigation process/strategy and the roles/responsibilities involved in legal case management. Key to this partnership was not only the development of the interdisciplinary model and structure, but also assessing both disciplines and the success of the pairings. Quantitative data is gathered through an interpersonal skills survey pretest and posttest research design, and qualitative data is gathered through a survey of open ended questions. All students were given the same questions, and responses were anonymous, with surveys administered by a third party. Using the generated responses, the presenters reformat the course each semester based upon feedback, as well as promote the use of this sort of model to other institutions and at various conferences. Other interdisciplinary partnerships are also explored based on student feedback, client and clinic needs. The initial surveys focused on a main goal of increasing law students’ interpersonal skills – as far too often law students’ focus is on the legal tasks and not the human components of interactions with clients. Data analysis found a statistically significant improvement in law students’ interpersonal skills, and level of comfort in dealing with clients in emotional situation. The second round of surveys have been submitted to both disciplines and hope to show two increases: 1) that the law students’ interpersonal skills maintain improvement; and 2) that social work students have a better understanding of the law and legal processes via their participation in the interdisciplinary clinic.Item Yes, You Can!: Course Collaboration for a Richer Learning Experience and Institutional Change(Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2011-04-08) Hagan, Carrie A.; Adams, CynthiaThe authors’ poster will report on their collaboration efforts, using experiential learning to enrich their respective curriculums and their respective students’ learning experiences. This collaboration is a major step towards effecting critically needed institutional change. For decades law school faculty have been engaged in an ongoing debate about whether theoretical, casebook courses are more important than clinical skills-building courses. Even within the clinical ranks we hear debates about the relative importance of clinical/experiential courses versus legal writing/simulated drafting courses. The fact is that all these experiences are essential to a law student’s education. Many, if not most, law faculty see the merit for each type of learning experience. However, because faculty are concerned that collaboration might infringe on their academic freedom or perhaps adversely affect their faculty status, their teaching efforts remain highly individualized. Students, though, are suffering from this compartmentalized approach to learning. First, they can encounter difficulties transferring the lessons learned in a course to either a real world situation or even another course. For example, students often have a difficult time transferring the motion or brief writing skills learned in a legal writing course to a clinical experience where they are drafting motions and briefs on behalf of clients. Second, because clinical skills-building courses are expensive, there is a tendency to offer fewer of these courses or fewer experiences. The more law schools can provide clinical skills-building opportunities to students and the more schools can provide different settings to reinforce these skills, the more prepared our law students will be for law practice upon graduation. The way to provide these additional experiences without breaking the budget is to provide collaborative experiences between courses. The authors have discovered that you can create a relatively low-key, low-prep collaboration while still respecting each collaborator’s autonomy and academic freedom. There are numerous benefits to this type of collaboration. The collaborators gain a new level of understanding and appreciation for what is going on in other courses. Also, collaborators can come away from the experience with fresh ideas for their own curriculum and inject new life in their courses. But, most importantly, the students benefit from the additional experience. The authors have joined together to create collaborative opportunities between their law school’s civil practice clinic and a brief drafting course. Prior to collaboration, both authors met to discuss their students’ respective needs and shared the pedagogy, goals, syllabi, and lesson plans for the respective courses. By sharing this information, the authors developed ways to incorporate new experiential learning opportunities for both sets of students in different contexts. For example, the brief-writing students work on issues commonly faced by the clinic students (e.g., child custody modification); the brief-writing students will also visit courts to observe proceedings. This experience gives the brief-writing students a sense of how issues addressed in their briefs have real world application. In turn, the clinic students will be judging the brief-writing students’ oral arguments. This experience, giving clinic students an opportunity to experience the other side of the bench gives them insight into ways to effectively advocate their own clients’ cases. The two best briefs from the brief-writing course that focus on issues often addressed in clinic cases will be placed on file in the clinic so that future clinic students will have access to these briefs to help jump-start their understanding of these issues and the law. The poster will illustrate the steps to partnering, report on the authors’ own collaborative experience, include recommendations on implementing this approach in other courses, and show how this type of collaboration can create positive outcomes for faculty and students, and facilitate institutional change.