Montana, P G --- "Lessons from the Carnegie and Best Practices reports: a look at the street law program as a model for teaching professional skills" [2009] LegEdDig 38; (2009) 17(3) Legal Education Digest 28

• Lessons from the Carnegie and Best Practices reports: a look at the Street Law program as a model for teaching professional skills

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Lessons from the Carnegie and Best Practices reports: a look at the Street Law program as a model for teaching professional skills

P. Montana

St. John’s Legal Studies Research Paper, No. 08-0157, 2008, pp 1–45

Law schools now recognise that there is a need for greater attention to professional skills instruction. Many are experimenting with teaching methods other than the traditional case style of teaching. In 2007, two very influential institutes published reports that favoured this new approach to legal education. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching published its report, ‘Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law’, and the Clinical Legal Education Association published its study, ‘Best Practices for Legal Education’ (collectively, the ‘Reports’). The Reports focus, in part, on the academy’s role in preparing students for practice. They conclude that law schools must devote more attention and resources to helping students develop the professional skills they will need in practice. The consensus was that the traditional case method of teaching is insufficient on its own to train students. They suggest that law schools can unite ‘formal knowledge’ and ‘the experience of practice’ by also offering non-traditional curricular offerings, such as clinics, externships, simulations, and other like opportunities.

St. John’s University School of Law currently offers a unique externship opportunity that effectively integrates doctrine and practice in the way the Reports advance. The program, named Street Law, allows law students to teach a practical law course to high school students in the local community of Queens, New York.

In 1972, Georgetown University Law Centre launched the first high-school based law-related education program. Those involved in teaching the first classes at Georgetown selected the name ‘Street Law’ as the course title to represent the content of the course – practical law important in a person’s everyday life on the street.

The current Georgetown Street Law High School Clinic is a six credit, year-long course. Since its inception, the program has been very successful and continues to operate in every District of Columbia public school today. It also has inspired many law schools across the country to adopt similar legal outreach programs.

‘Street Law’ is also the name of the private, non-profit organisation, Street Law Inc, which was formerly called the National Institute for Citizen Education and the Law. Its goal is to promote citizen legal education. In that spirit, it seeks to help start Street Law programs at law schools across the nation and internationally. It also publishes the textbook entitled Street Law: a Course in Practical Law, which many law schools, including Georgetown and St. John’s, use in their course.

In 2006, my goal of directing a law-school based Street Law program of my very own was realised. I created St. John’s current Street Law Externship program as part of its credit-bearing curriculum.

It is a semester-long program open to eight second- and third-year law students. The law students teach a practical law course to high school students, mostly ninth graders, at Jamaica High School, a New York City public school, located in Queens, New York. Jamaica High School is comprised of a predominantly black student body. There are approximately 2,500 9th – 12th grade students; 60 per cent of them are black or African American, 20 per cent are Asian, Native Hawaiian, or other Pacific Islander, 18 per cent are Hispanic or Latino, and two per cent are White. Most come from low-income households and nearly 12 per cent are English learners.

Jamaica High School has a fairly developed law program. They offer a four-year sequence of law classes, including ones in introduction to law, family law, criminal law, civil law, and constitutional law. The law students typically teach in the introduction to law classes. They devote approximately three hours per week to teaching subjects, such as criminal law and procedure, torts, consumer law, family housing, and individual rights law. On the days that they are not teaching, the high school teacher teaches the law curriculum.

The law students also attend a weekly two-hour seminar course, where they learn the substantive law to be taught as well as creative and effective teaching methodologies. The law students receive two graded credits for the seminar and one pass/fail credit for their teaching in the high school. The students’ final grade is based on the quality of their lesson plans and journal assignments as well as their performance at the high school and during the seminar.

The seminar educates the law students on the substantive and policy issues to be taught in the high school classroom. In a typical semester, we cover how laws reflect societal values and beliefs, the lawmaking process, the art of advocacy, the organisation and operation of the court system, and the role of a lawyer. We also spend considerable time on constitutional issues. Because our audience is high school students, we cover material related to these topics that is relevant to them.

Though the high school students will not read any of the actual judicial opinions in these areas, the law students will as part of their assigned reading for the seminar.

The law students prepare for the seminar, like their other classes, by reading and briefing the cases. Unlike their preparation for other classes, however, they also must consider the best ways to communicate to the high school students the rules from those cases and how they are applied in real world situations. They must decide on an approach that will challenge the high school students to think critically about the law.

The seminar introduces the law students to innovative and effective teaching methodologies appropriate for high school students. Therefore, they receive much practice in how to communicate complicated legal concepts to non-lawyers. One common technique is to use non-legal analogies to explain legal concepts.

We discuss the law to be covered at the high school always one week in advance so that the students have time to improve their lessons before they actually teach them. In addition, each student is responsible for one ‘demonstration teaching’. This means that each student must teach a lesson to the seminar class. At the conclusion of the demonstration teaching, the class completes a written evaluation and together we discuss the relevant law, the quality of the material, its relevance to the high school students, and the effectiveness of the lesson.

Additionally, during the final seminar classes, we discuss the prevalent themes of the course. They include: the interplay between law and values; the purpose and effect of laws; the difficulty in crafting laws that serve their purpose; the use of precedent; the reality that rights are not absolute; and, finally, the balance between government interests and individual rights. To bring these themes to life, I ask the students to create a portfolio of their teaching experience.

The project asks the students to answer several questions – all of which address the goals of the course. For example, one question asks whether they have discovered any new perspectives or developed skills that significantly enriched their education. This project allows the students to see how they have grown professionally from the experience.

The students are required to prepare, research, and design their own lesson plans for each class that they teach. The lessons must not only address the topics I assign, but also explore issues related to those topics that are relevant and meaningful to the high school students’ experiences. The lesson plans are due one week prior to their teaching so that there is adequate time for me to give individual as well as group feedback.

In addition to laying out the organisation and substance of the lesson, they must include anticipated responses to the questions and other materials planned for the lesson. This requirement forces the law students to explore all aspects of a legal topic, encouraging them to prepare for and execute lessons that expose the tension of competing interests and spark lively debates.

The lessons must be organised according to the following sections: Title, Objectives, Methodology, and Summary. The ‘Title’ describes the essence of that week’s lesson. The ‘Objectives’ is written from the perspective of the high school students and explains what they will gain at the conclusion of the lesson.

The ‘Methodology’ section explains how the law students intend to carry out their objectives. In that section, they explain, among other things, the types of questions, activities, and exercises that they will use to present the legal topic.

Finally, the ‘Summary’ section is written to the high school students and describes what they should have learned from the lesson. It is more important that the students understand the different interests at stake than memorise the current state of the law. Therefore, I prefer that the law student waits until the end of the class to reveal the Court’s holding.

The law students are also required to submit journal assignments throughout the semester. I assign different topics for each written assignment. Like the portfolio project, they are intended to give the students an opportunity to reflect on what they learned, their teaching style, accomplishments, and areas for improvement, among other things. I also ask them to describe any new insights they gained from the students’ questions, reactions or comments.

All of the journal questions ask the students to reflect on how the experience has helped them develop, apply, and refine lawyering skills. These assignments usually have a minimum, but not a maximum, page requirement, as I like to encourage as much reflection as a student needs.

The students visit the high school twice a week for approximately one hour each time. The students are grouped in teams of two. Each team member teaches on one of the days and observes his or her partner teach on the other day. Because I am only able to observe the students teach once or twice a semester, the team approach keeps a check on them when I’m not there. In fact, at times, my journal assignments ask the students to comment on their partner’s performance in the classroom.

I do assess, however, the delivery of their lessons to the high school students, their responses to student questions, and their summaries of the law. These factors tell me whether they are competent at communicating complicated legal concepts to non-lawyers in a clear and concise fashion – an essential skill for practice. After I have completed my observations, I meet with each student for a ‘debriefing’ session. In that meeting, we discuss their performance, including such topics as their teaching methodology, classroom demeanour, mastery over the subject matter, and involvement of the high school students.

The Reports support integrating doctrine and practice as a means of achieving the primary goal of helping students develop competence, which is to resolve legal problems effectively and responsibly. In the traditional law school curriculum, law students practice legal analysis by reading cases and discussing them in class. While this process teaches students important legal rules and how those rules are applied by the courts, it does not completely prepare them to solve future legal problems on their own. Law students must see firsthand how legal analysis plays out in practice

For this reason, the Reports ask law schools to unite in a ‘single educational framework, the two sides of legal knowledge: (1) formal knowledge and (2) the experience of practice’.

The Reports recommend experiential courses as one way to unite these two sides. Such courses teach problem-solving, interpersonal and professional skills, as well as a sense of public responsibility – all of which are essential to training students to be effective and responsible lawyers.

The ‘core function of practicing lawyers’ is to help others resolve legal problems. It is thus critical that law schools provide more opportunities for students to engage in problem-solving activities so that they can be competent at this core function. When students experience how the rules they studied in class are applied in a real or hypothetical setting, they gain a deeper appreciation for them and understanding for how best to apply them in future situations.

In addition to honing students’ problem-solving skills, the Reports urge law schools to help their students develop a host of other essential lawyering skills. Importantly, they should also know how to ‘work with, manipulate, and apply’ what they learn in all types of situations.

Students should also demonstrate strong self-reflection and lifelong learning skills. Because law schools will not be able to teach students every subject of the law or prepare them for every circumstance in practice, they must show them how to evaluate their own level of performance so that they can competently develop a plan for teaching and preparing themselves when they encounter areas unfamiliar to them.

Moreover, students must be skilled in time management, team work, research, and oral and written communication. The practice of law requires that attorneys have exceptional time management skills and work cooperatively with others as part of a team.

Law schools should devote greater attention to instruction in professionalism. Professionalism is ideally taught through ‘dramatic pedagogies of simulation and participation’.

The Reports also encourage law schools to teach their students a sense of public responsibility in an effort to help restore the public’s trust in the legal system. Because many law students graduate without ever having had an opportunity to work with people in the community, many new lawyers feel no obligation to reach out to the community in practice. Law schools can change how graduates view their role in the community by creating scenarios in which they interact with others. This exposure will help instil in them a sense of public duty.

Additionally, by working in the community, law students see how the law affects others, both justly and unjustly. In an actual setting, law students witness how individuals are affected by laws, which makes a greater impact on the students’ understanding of them. To the extent that they see injustice, they might be encouraged to change the law after they graduate.

By offering more experiential programs, law schools can help their students connect their ‘cognitive, or academic, experience embodied in the case-dialogue method’ to the realities of law practice.

Therefore, experiential courses are integral to graduating more competent and professional attorneys.

St. John’s Street Law Program successfully unites doctrine and practice and promotes professionalism. By teaching a law-related education course to high school students in the community, law students learn the practical applications of legal concepts and sharpen their problem solving skills. Additionally, the program teaches important professional skills, including communication skills, time management skills, and interpersonal skills. Because the law students work on problems that affect the community, they also develop a strong connection to the public. This positive experience with the community helps to raise the public’s respect for lawyers and the legal system generally. Therefore, through a single experience that takes place predominantly outside of the traditional law school classroom, St. John’s is able to achieve many of the Reports’ goals.

The Street Law program provides many opportunities for the law students to engage in problem-solving activities. The law students are responsible for researching and designing lessons that are current and relevant to their students’ lives. Therefore, the experience of teaching a practical law class to the poor youth in the community breaths life into legal issues that simply does not exist in textbook reading or a traditional classroom discussion.

Furthermore, the law students use interactive teaching strategies, such as mock trials, legislative hearings, role-plays, moot courts, and simulated negotiations, to teach the law to the high school students. As a result, legal procedures and concepts come alive in the classroom, allowing the law students to gain insights that might not be readily apparent by studying them in a traditional law school classroom.

By seeing the law in action, the law students are more likely to remember it and use it correctly in practice. This foundation is what they will need to effectively solve legal problems in the future.

The Street Law program helps students develop some of the essential lawyering skills ‘that mark the professional’. They receive in-depth training in the substantive law, hone oral advocacy and communication skills, practice important time management skills, enhance their legal research and writing skills, improve their self-directed learning skills, and collaborate in teams. The entire experience thus positively shapes their ability to become honest, caring, and competent attorneys.

The students have pressure to perform well because they do not want to embarrass themselves in front of their peers. Moreover, because, like all new teachers, the law students often worry about being stumped by students’ questions in class, they learn the material well enough to respond to potential questions or hypotheticals posed by them.

What is most unique about the Street Law experience is that the law students’ regular teaching of the law is what allows them to understand it and eventually master it. If the law students have only a surface understanding of those steps, it will become very apparent when they design their lessons or later when they teach them. The program also allows students to practice their self-directed learning skills. Through their journal entries and the portfolio project, the law students continually reflect on how the Street Law program has influenced their professional development.

Furthermore, the program requires that the students work in teams of two. The program expects effective collaboration because they must provide a consistent learning experience to their students.

Importantly, the program also enhances the law students’ legal research and writing skills. The students are expected to research each lesson and find legal issues that are timely and relevant to the high school students’ experiences. This often means that students become familiar with local laws, including city legislation and ordinances, an area of research typically not taught in their first year legal research classes.

Law students leave the program with a greater understanding of and sensitivity toward the legal problems of urban residents, minorities, young people, the poor, and schools. Through the insights they gain and connections they make with the community, the law students develop a real sense of public responsibility.

The Street Law program has helped the law students take into account their students’ views.

This broader approach to the law helps the law students deal more productively with clients, lawyers, judges, and others in practice, thereby making them superior advocates.

Because the law students use learner-focused methods and explore topics relevant to the high school students’ lives, the classroom atmosphere fosters ‘authentic learning’. By the end of the semester, the high school students have a deeper respect for and understanding of the law.

Because their experience with the law students is usually a very positive one, they also see a different side to lawyers and the legal system. They better understand what lawyers do. This insight increases their confidence in them, which, in turn, helps to improve the public’s trust in the legal system.