“11. What fundamental information and communication skills do students exercise in your course (i.e., reading, researching, listening / oral and written communication)? ”

that bothers me. What is it?

I guess it’s that I fear it may be too easy for my colleagues (and for me, for that matter) to assume that because students are, technically speaking, “exercising” in the sense of, “engaging in” reading, listening, etc., that they are genuinely DEVELOPING those skills — which I don’t believe is necessarly the case unless, e.g., there is structured, conceptualized instruction; actual class hours and/or out-of-class hours are allocated and dedicated; there are reading assignments or observational assignments or videos or some other form of assignment; etc. In other words, within the course framework, are there explicit elements that truly exercise the students’ developing competence? By “exercise” I mean “movement designed to develop greater facility or range or strength,” not just “movement that happens to occur, as opposed to stasis.”

(I’m pretty sure that I’m not making much sense, but I’m in too deep to abandon this poor metaphor, which I am now officially beating within an inch of its life.) So, if I merely walk down the street at my normal pace, yes, that is exercise compared with sitting in my office. But it is NOT exercise compared with working out in the gym under the guidance of a perceptive, encouraging, and knowledgeable trainer who artfully gets me to repeat all sorts of complex movements that do not come naturally to me at all, but which gradually induce greater agility and flexibillity and build more powerful muscles in particular places. (I wish I could pretend that I have ever actually had this experience.)

That’s the kind of “exercise” we should be aiming for in that most expensive-gym-our-students-will-ever-join, the law school classroom. But because “reading” and “listening” are such deceptively routine and ubiquitous activities, we may need to refine our inquiry further to determine whether something akin to true “exercise” is going on in that classroom. After all, our students don’t have to pay $$$ and commute to our campus to read and to listen; they can do that at home. (They’re speaking prose there, too.)

One of Barbara’s next questions:

13. What skill do students bring to your course that students have an opportunity to master through repeated opportunities for practice and feedback?

certainly addresses my concern with its focus on repetition, feedback, and conscious effort at mastery, but still I fear that it may be too easy to conflate the _performance_ of a skill — reading, for example — with its _development_. Teachers who have let themselves off the hook by deciding that their traditional law school class inherently “exercises” listening, reading ,etc. skills, may not be detained by this subsequent question.

This said, I remain in awe of Babara’s fabulous work and would truly believe that I had died and finagled my way into heaven (probably with the help of a good lawyer) were my faculty to begin using this rubric in their daily work.

Vanessa

ps: Just one more time: I am _so_ P.O.’d that clinic casework kept me from going to the U. Wa. Conference! However, happy to report that we won both our trials in Immigration Court last week — and there were bushels and boatloads of good learning going on, so . . .