Is legal education working?

The ‘is legal education working?’ stream at the Learning in Law Annual Conference 2007 included the following papers:

• E-portfolios in the professions: experiences from law, medicine and veterinary medicine – Patricia McKellar (UKCLE) et al read full paper
• Reflective practice through personal development planning: towards the empowerment of learners and the enhancement of academic practice…or not? – Sefton Bloxham and Andrea Cerevkova (Edge Hill) read report below
• The problem-based learning approach in legal education: a personal reflection and evaluation – Umut Turksen (University of the West of England) read report below
• Legal education in the context of Carter – Sara Chandler and Wendy Pettifer (College of Law) read report below
• Undergraduate legal education: fit for purpose? – Rob East (University of Glamorgan) read report below

The stream also featured a vocational discussion session and a session on the review of legal education in Scotland, as well as updates on UKCLE’s SIMPLE project looking at learning through simulations and the Toolkit for law teaching project.

Reflective practice through personal development planning

Sefton and Andrea’s session looked at how they have begun to integrate personal development planning (PDP) into the law programme at Edge Hill, exploring the challenges they faced from both students and colleagues.

PDP has been introduced into a first year undergraduate module (legal methods and systems), assessed through a careers management portfolio and a reflective log. Delivered using both classroom and online activities, the module aims to develop student acquisition of subject specific and generic study skills, careers management awareness, reflective learning and writing skills, and subject knowledge and understanding.

Student feedback to date has been encouragingly positive while at the same time identifying specific aspects that demand further development. The tutors’ reflections, while remaining broadly positive, are more equivocal in the light of some of the difficulties encountered. The range of issues that have emerged include the role of personal tutors, quality assurance in relation to the assessment process, the development of reflective learning (and academic practice!), effective use of a virtual learning environment and resource implications.

For further information see Reflective learning, skills development and careers management online: an evaluation of a first year law module.

The problem-based learning approach in legal education: a personal reflection and evaluation

“We do not have a knowledge gap, we have a monumental use of knowledge gap.” (Perkins, 1992)

It is impossible to teach students all they need to know about law in three years, and even if it were possible to do so it would soon be out of date. Recent anti-terrorism laws in the UK are a good example – in the last five years we have witnessed three Acts of Parliament dealing with terrorism. It is therefore imperative that students know how to solve problems and how to acquire the information needed to solve a problem.

Umut described the use of problem-based learning (PBL) to teach on an LLM, reflecting an approach to the curriculum which is problem rather than discipline centred, serving as a useful introduction to law teachers new to PBL.

Legal education in the context of Carter

Sara and Wendy explored the implications of the Carter review of legal aid procurement for legal education, in paticular on rates for undertaking legal aid work. They suggested that for many practitioners the new rates were so low that they would be prevented from undertaking a range of traditional cases, for instance relating to housing. Such a change would present law clinics and those offering pro bono with a number of new challenges and opportunities – a greater caseload may become available, but clinics could also face more complex cases, with inevitable resource implications.

Undergraduate legal education: fit for purpose?

In Rob’s view much remains to be done to ensure undergraduate legal education is ‘fit for purpose’. He posed three key questions:

• Is undergraduate legal education dominated by ‘amateurism’? According to Weavers (2003) the importance of high quality teaching is at best a secondary consideration in higher education and at worst ignored. A move to a more professional approach requires knowledge of educational theory, which shows that the traditional emphasis on didactic lectures and examinations as a form of assessment, based on the behaviourist approach, in fact has very little credibility.
• Do prevalent learning, teaching and assessment practices actually promote ‘superficial learning’? Much undergraduate legal education results in surface learning by students, rather than deep learning – this is overwhelmingly the lecturers’ fault. Surface approaches are encouraged by such factors as assessment methods emphasising recall or the application of trivial procedural knowledge, assessment methods that create anxiety and an excessive amount of material in the curriculum.
• How can constructivist approaches to education improve matters? According to Johnstone (1996) “…learning is more than simply an increase in the amount of knowledge that students acquire. Rather, learning involves a process of change, in which learners move to a greater understanding, experience or conceptualisation of a subject or discipline. Learning builds on the learner’s background and previous learning, and can only be carried out by the learner.”

The paper was a timely and useful reminder of the case against didactic, teacher-centred methods, not least because lectures and other traditional approaches still pervade undergraduate and a great deal of postgraduate legal education.

A number of factors may even have strengthened their role as the dominant delivery method over recent years, including the growth in student numbers, the emphasis placed on research outputs as a consequence of the Research Assessment Exercise, the increasing costs of specialist learning resources and the demand for access to distance learning.

Last Modified: 9 July 2010