Business Models, Faculty Size, Tuition — and Best Practices

Somehow I think this post should have preceded yesterday’s!  The National Jurist today claims that “The average law school has lowered its faculty-to-student ratio by 22 percent over the past 10 years ” accounting for “48 percent of the tuition increases” in that time period.
http://www.nationaljurist.com/content/what-make-rise-faculty-size
Does the claim fit your experience?  Has your faculty size grown?  [...]

National Law Journal Covers Student Learning Outcomes Discussion

LAW SCHOOLS
Holding schools accountable
ABA is pushing educators to prove their law graduates can cut it. by Karen Sloan
February 22, 2010
When 3,500 legal educators convened in New Orleans for the Association of American Law School’s annual meeting in January, one topic dominated the conversation: the American Bar Association’s attempts to add “student learning outcomes” to its [...]

Calling All “Contracts” Professors: What’s your favorite coursebook?

As we have been implementing Best Practices and Carnegie reforms, many of us have created or have made creative use of  coursebooks which facilitate Best Practices learning and teaching.     One of my colleagues will be teaching Contracts for the first time this fall,  she has extensive practice experience and has excelled at clinical supervision and clinical pedagogy.   [...]

Lots of Great Stuff from CLEA — Check it out

From Kim Connolly and Larry Spain:
The February, 2010 issue of the CLEA Newsletter has been published and posted on the CLEA website, http://www.cleaweb.org.  It can be found under the What’s Happening Tab. This will also give you an opportunity to explore the new CLEA website.  which we are calling 1.0 for now, because it is as [...]

Best Practices for Legal Education in Monterrey, Mexico

The States in Mexico are, one by one, revising their criminal law and criminal procedure codes to change from an inquisitional, written system to an adversarial system with oral trials. Of course, this transformation is a major change in their legal culture. And, the law school leaders in Mexico [...]

BEST PRACTICES AND LAND USE LAW: a “natural” merger?

A new article just posted to SSRN examines Best Practices in the field of land use law.  The article, “Practically Grounded: Convergence of Land Use Pedagogy and Best Practices” is forthcoming in the Journal of Legal Education. (One can downloand at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1540713). 
The authors (my colleague Dean Patricia Salkin from Albany Law School and Professor John [...]

Course Design – Technology Meets Substance in On-Line Curriculum Development

After setting course learning outcomes for the on-line government ethics course, I had to revise my syllabus to better match my goals and desired outcomes mindful of the on-line format, and I had to develop creative strategies for creating a vibrant virtual discussion that would satisfactorily create a functional equivalent of an in-person classroom discussion.
To [...]

Support for Empirical Research on Teaching/Assessment

The Need for Scholarship About Law Teaching and Learning
When we teach or assess differently, we often wonder: does this actually make a difference?  Does it improve student learning?  If so, does it improve all students’ learning, or does it only help a particular segment of students?  What do students think about this different methodology?  Does [...]

AALS Conference ABA Accreditation Standards Panel – Requiring Law Schools to Measure Student Learning

Today at 4pm,  Standards Review Committee presented on the current draft  revisions to the ABA accreditation standards  and according to the conference materials on ”this directional change in legal education. “  I was delighted to hear Professor Margaret Martin Barry introduce  the panel presentation with a quote from Roy Stuckey urging the Committee to focus on the importance of [...]

Orientation Programs

A fun aspect of getting a few gray hairs: we might be around long enough to see our ideas come to fruition.   Some years ago I wrote about the important role of experiential learning in providing context for law students.  Passion, Context, and Lawyering Skills: Choosing Among Simulated and Real Clinical Experiences, 7 Clin. L. [...]

International Perspective on Best Practices Blog

I bet some of you missed the fact that October 5th is World Teachers’ Day.  Yeah for us!  Rah for the team!
The UK’s Centre for Legal Education’s Digital Directions notes that the Best Practices blog is the only blog “focused on legal education as their primary theme.”    We’ll be delighted when we no longer hold [...]

ABA Top 100 Blawgs

The ABA Journal is conducting its annual survey to find the Top 100 legal blogs (blawgs).  Please take a minute to vote for Best Practices! Your support is very much appreciated.
                                                                                                   Thanks, 
                                                                                                   The Best Practices Bloggers

Counting Clinical Opportunities

I just finished writing a letter to the editor of National Jurist about the magazine’s ranking of the “Best Law Schools for Practical Training” in the September issue.  They don’t have a letter to the editor section, so I don’t expect it to get it published, but I did want to educate the magazine about Best [...]

Mr. Best Practices’s Birthday

 
Happy Birthday Professor Roy Stuckey!   Roy’s birthday was celebrated at the AALS Annual Conference. 

Input & Ideas from Jan 08 AALS Conference

It ’s a new year for Blogging and here we are in the Exhibit Hall at the AALS Conference.  Come visit us on the 1st floor, make a left and go all the way to the end and you’ll find us against the wall!   Interestingly, we are right next to Harvard University Press! 
Conference attendees: please [...]