Learning from each other: global and local interdependencies in legal eduction

Professor Paul Mahargpaulmaharg.com/slides

1. Challenging hegemoniesconditions for self-determination; modes of learning

2.Simulated clients a portrait of the outsider as insider3. Digital innovations

Simulations: SIMPLE, VOS4. Extreme law schooling

Examples of law schooling at the edge (or over it)

preview

1. Challenging hegemonies

signature pedagogies (Lee Shulman)

Sullivan, W.M., Colby, A., Wegner, J.W., Bond, L., Shulman, L.S. (2007) Educating Lawyers. Preparation for the Profession of Law, Jossey-Bass, p. 24

transforming the pedagogy…?

John Dewey(1859-1952)

At Columbia U, he was involved in…

• Special Conference on Logical and Ethical Problems of Law (1922), and conducted 1925-30 jointly with Edwin Wilhite Patterson

• Student course, entitled Logical and Ethical Problems of the Law.

‘A democracy is more thana form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated activity.’

Democracy and Education (1916)

Standard classroom c.1908. Would you like to learn about measurement and volume this way?

Thanks to Mike Sharples,http://tinyurl.com/6bzdgx

…or this way? (Dewey’s Laboratory School, U. of Chicago, 1901)

http://tinyurl.com/6onvjp

Would you like to learn about history and town planning this way?

… or by building a table-top town for a social life history project? (Dewey’s Lab School)

http://tinyurl.com/59c93q

two origins of contemporary learning theory

‘One cannot understand the history of education in the United States in the twentieth century unless one realizes that Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost.’ Lageman, E.C. (1989) The plural worlds of educational research, History of Education Quarterly, 29(2), 185-214

E.L. Thorndike John Dewey

E.L. Thorndike John Dewey1. Educational psychologist Philosopher & educationalist

2. Theoretician & experimentalist Theoretician and practical implementer

3. Explored the dyadic relationship between mind & the world

Interested in the arc between experience & the world

4. Adopted as precursor of a behaviourist approach to learning: assessment-led; laws of effect, recency, repetition

Pragmatist approach to learning: prior experience, ways of contextual knowing; democracy & education

5. Emphasised teaching strategies Emphasised learning ecologies

6. Followed by: Watson, Skinner, Gagné; outcomes, competence & instructional design (ID) movements.

Followed by: Bruner, Kilpatrick, standards movement, Constructivist tradition.

• New design• New regulatory environments• Autonomy, relatedness, connectedness – the language of self-

determination theory• Making legal education porous• Shifting balances of power• Acting for the local while being aware of the global in

educational theory & practice

so what challenges hegemonic legal education?

2. Simulated clients

Standardised Client Initiative• Original personnel:

– Professor Clark Cunningham, Georgia State University– Professor Gregory Jones, GSU– Dr Jean Ker, Clinical Skills Unit, Medical Faculty, University of

Dundee– Professor Paul Maharg, ANU– Karen Barton, University of Hertfordshire

source of the idea…• Medical education:

– Around 50 years of practice and research:• 497 biomed literature citations & abstracts• 527 journal articles• 30 books[Medline PubMed, keywords <“simulated patient”> 26.10.11]

• Widespread use in medical schools, MEUs, hospitals, primary care, CPD, assessment centres.

• Large body of research literature criticised oral exams beginning in 1960s

• ‘A test that is not reliable cannot be valid’ e.g. NBME (USA) studies exams of 10,000 medical examiners over 3 years and found correlations between 2 examiners in one encounter <0.25

• Use of Standardised Patients since 1963• Now used in high-stakes competency examination for licensure in

USA and Canada • Extensively used in final exam ‘OSCE’ stations in UK medical schools

evidence from medical educationStandardiz

ed Clients

SCI: our hypothesis

With proper training and carefully designed assessment procedures, Standardised Clients (SCs) can assess important aspects of client interviewing with validity and reliability comparable to assessment by law teachers.

aims• develop a practical and cost-effective method to assess the effectiveness

of lawyer-client communication which correlates assessment with the degree of client satisfaction & confidence.

• ie answer the following questions…1. Is our current system of teaching and assessing interviewing skills

sufficiently reliable and valid?2. Can the Standardised Patient method be translated successfully to the

legal domain?3. Is the method of Standardised Client training and assessment more

reliable, valid and cost-effective than the current system?

resultsQuestions Results

1 Is our current system of teaching and assessing interviewing skills sufficiently 1. reliable? 2. valid?

1.No2.No

2 Can the Standardised Patient method be translated successfully to the legal domain?

Yes.

3 Is the method of Standardised Client training and assessment more1.reliable, 2.valid3.cost-effective than the current system?

1.Yes2.Yes3.Yes

place of the client…?• We make what the client thinks important in the most salient way for the

student: an assessment where most of the grade is given by the client• We do not conclude that all aspects of client interviewing can be assessed

by SCs– We focus the assessment on aspects we believe can be accurately

evaluated by non-lawyers– We focus the assessment on initial interview (which is currently being

extended at Northumbria to an advice-giving interview)• This has changed the way we enable students, trainees and lawyers to

learn interviewing & client-facing ethical behaviour

who uses SCs?Strathclyde University Law School WS Society (Edinburgh)

University of New Hampshire The Australian National University College of Law

Northumbria U Law School Kwansei Gakuin U Law School (Osaka)

SRA (QLTS) Law Society of Ireland

Hong Kong University Faculty of Law Adelaide University Law School

The Chinese University of Hong Kong Law School

National Centre for Skills in Social Care, London

SCs: people as co-producers, co-designersThe SC approach challenges:

1. Curriculum methods2. Ethics of the client encounter3. The cognitive poverty of conventional law school assessment4. Law school as a self-regarding, monolithic construct5. Law school categories of employment6. The curricular isolation of clinic within law schools7. Hollowed-out skills rhetoric8. Conventional forms of regulation by regulatory bodies9. The role of regulator, as encourager of innovation & radical reform…?10. Disciplinary boundaries – what about a SC Unit that’s interdisciplinary?11. Local jurisdictional practices: how might such a project work globally?

3. Digital innovations

experiential learning in law: SIMPLESIMulated Professional Learning Environment enables students to engage in online simulations of professional practice. Its special pedagogy is based on transactional learning:

active learning through performance in authentic transactions involving reflection in & on learning, deep collaborative learning, and holistic or process learning, with relevant professional assessment that includes ethical standards

correspondence file

Ardcalloch directory

map of Ardcalloch

Personal Injury project: assessment criteria

We require from each student firm a body of evidence consisting of:

• fact-finding – from information sources in the virtual community)

• professional legal research & comms• formation of negotiation strategy – extending

range of prior learning in a curriculum spiral• performance of strategy – correspondence +

optional f2f meetings, recorded

learning spaces: three issues1. Information management: how do students gather, track,

archive, recall, analyze data? 2. Managing voice, register, genre.3. Discussion forum as

relational space, used as a back-channel, close to drafting& posting, and giving the firma professional identity as aunit, when working on sharedtasks.

PI project: (some of) what students learned

• extended team working• real legal fact-finding• real legal research• process thinking in the project• setting out negotiation strategies in the context of (un)known

information• writing to specific audiences• handling project alongside other work commitments• structuring the argument of a case from start to finish• keeping cool in face-to-face negotiations• more effective delegation• keeping files & taking notes on the process...• being professional about work and life

Practice Management includes:

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key issue: simulation tempo and complexity

feasibility? cost? impact?Feasible…?• Very: lots of experience out there in Strathclyde, Northumbria,

Glamorgan, ANU. Complex to create sims in the SIMPLE Toolset, but easy to maintain.

Cost…?• Development of sims; learning support for students• SIMPLE is open-source and freely available• SIMPLE blueprints & guidance documents are freely available under

Creative Commons licences. Impact…? • on students: ethical performance, learning legal argumentation, practice

of skills within professional value contexts; critique of professionalism; formative and high-stakes assessment; transactional learning

who used SIMPLE?Strathclyde University Law School Strathclyde U Management Science

University of New Hampshire The Australian National University College of Law (their own version)

Northumbria U Law School Kwansei Gakuin U Law School (Osaka) (their own version)

University of South Wales Law School RechtenOnline, Netherlands

Maharg, P. (2007), Transactional learning in action, chapter 7, Transforming Legal Education. Learning and Teaching the Law in the Early Twenty-first Century, Ashgate Publishing.

Maharg, P., de Freitas, S., (2011). Digital games and learning: modelling learning experiences in the digital age, chapter 1, in de Freitas, S., Maharg, P. (eds)Digital Games and Learning, Continuum Press.

Maharg, P. (2011) Space, absence, silence: the intimate dimensions of legal learning, chapter 13, in Maharg, P., Maughan, C., eds, Affect and Legal Education: Emotion in Learning and Teaching the Law, Ashgate Publishing.

further information

4. Extreme law schooling

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example 1: curriculum design• New programme designs such as JD + PBL + online

– New three year curriculum: 2 (undergrad, qualifying) + 1 (Masters).– Integration of traditionally separate subjects– Focus on collaborative problem-solving using a PBL methodology– Learning intellectual structures through problem immersion– Fusing learning and immersive, integrative assessment– Healing the academic / professional divide, in design and in new forms of

employment (adjuncts as PBL facilitators)– Retaining choice of career pathways– Possibility of global partnerships with other innovative PBL centres.

‘The new competition, the real threat . . . is the emergence of

entirely new models of university which are seeking to exploit

the radically changed circumstances that are the result of

globalisation and the digital revolution.’An Avalanche is coming, Higher Education and the Revolution Ahead. IPPR , March 2013

http://www.ippr.org/publication/55/10432/an-avalanche-is-coming-higher-education-and-the-revolution-ahead

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blockchain• Blockchain code – a shared public register of code

transactions• Decentralized file storage• Decentralized Autonomous Organisations• On-chain decentralized marketplaces for services

• Open technology platform• ‘Permissionless innovation’

which services use / could use blockchain?• Currencies & sub-currencies, eg Bitcoins - http://bit.ly/1nWUfyT - decentralized digital

cryptocurrencies. See www.bitcoin.org • Almost any financial instrument• Further, more sophisticated platforms,

eg Ethereum, www.ethereum.org• Contracts and wills• Savings wallets• Online voting• Decentralized government• Secure messaging - http://bit.ly/1qtpvpZ • Decentralized data feed• Legal education…?

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In financial terms, the digital blockchain performs moves we’ve seen in other industries, and particularly in disintermediation. In legal education, a blockchained environment might include learning objects, a comms system, a badge system (eg Mozilla Badges), a payment system, access to knowledge and skills environments and other decentralised functions. Decentralisation — what’s the role of the LMS then? I’d guess that we’re already moving away from it, and blockchained legal education will probably render it unwieldy, pointless.More fundamentally, and given disintermediation, what does this do to the nature, role and status of the law school as educational institution? And how should this be regulated? http://paulmaharg.com/2014/06/28/emergent-educational-designs-and-distributed-autonomous-organisations/ and http://legalinformatics.wordpress.com/2014/06/30/maharg-emergent-educational-designs-and-distributed-autonomous-organisations/

legal education DAO• Peer-to-peer• Peer-to-object• learning objects + comms system + badge system (eg Mozilla Badges) +

payment system + other decentralized functions (eg IFTTT), using identity and reputation system as a base

• Regulation? See regulation of VoiP, and Bitcoins itselfhttp://bit.ly/1jKa4Ex

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IFTTTThe title is an acronym — short for “If This Then That” — which neatly describes the function of the product. It is essentially a giant switchboard to connect disparate services, anything from Facebook to text messages to telephone calls. Users can create “recipes” in which an action on one service can trigger an action on another entirely different service. […] The idea, according to co-founder Linden Tibbets, is to give people more creative control over the many online services they use on a daily basis. http://bit.ly/1nNKYeX

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references

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Rowe, M. and Murray, M. (2012) Teaching professionalism online – An Australian professional legal education experience, in The Calling Of Law, Fiona Westwood and Karen Barton (eds), Ashgate, 2012

Ferguson A and Lee E. (2012).Desperately Seeking ... Relevant Assessment? A Case Study on the Potential for Using Online Simulated Group Based Learning to Create Sustainable Assessment Practices(Link) Legal Education Review VOLUME 22 (2012) No 1&2. 2012 accessible at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2412334

Tang S and Ferguson A, (2013). Surprisingly well: Preliminary results from Surveys of Australian Professional Legal Education Students, QUT Law Review Special Edition 2013 accessible at https://lr.law.qut.edu.au/article/view/521

Barton, K., McKellar, P., Maharg, P. (2007) Authentic fictions: simulations, professionalism and legal learning, Clinical Law Review, 14, 1, 143-93. Available at: http://tinyurl.com/5vautp

Maharg, P. (2012). Simulation: a pedagogy emerging from the shadows, in Educating the Digital Lawyer , edited by Oliver Goodenough and Marc Lauritsen. LexisNexis & Berkman Centre for Internet and Society, Harvard University.

Maharg, P. (2012). ‘You are here’: learning law, practice and professionalism in the Academy, in Bankowski, Z., Maharg, P. del Mar, M., editors The Arts and the Legal Academy. Beyond Text in Legal Education, vol 1. Ashgate Publishing, Aldershot.

Maharg, P. (2012). 'Associated life’: democratic professionalism and the moral imagination, in Bankowski, Z., del Mar, M., eds, The Moral Imagination and the Legal Life. Beyond Text in Legal Education, vol 2. Ashgate Publishing, Aldershot.

Email: paul.maharg@anu.edu.auWeb: paulmaharg.comSlides: paulmaharg.com/slides

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