B. New Paradigm

Legal education is making a change. Ever so slowly, professors are dropping the old paradigm of teaching and adopting a new paradigm. Many legal educators hunger for a change. They are actively discussing alternatives. In one survey, 29 percent of the law faculty said that they used new approaches “very often,” 56 percent said “sometimes,” and 15 percent said “rarely,” none said “never.” However, the issue is not merely whether we use the case method or the problem method; whether we use discussion method or Socratic Method; or whether we teach in small classes or large classes. We need to shift our thinking and paradigm about student learning and faculty teaching. Johnson, Johnson, and Smith have articulated the principles on which such a paradigm would be based:

Students construct, discover, transform, develop, and extend their own knowledge and skills;

· Students construct knowledge and skills actively, not passively;

· Faculties aim their efforts at developing students' competencies and talents;

· Education is a personal transaction;

· Only a Cooperative Learning environment can achieve all of the above; and,

· Teaching is the complex application of theory and research that requires considerable instructor training and continuous refinement of teaching skills and procedures.

Students construct, discover, transform, develop and extend their own knowledge and skills. Law professors must put more of our effort into creating the conditions within which students can construct their own meaning and develop their own skills. Students will need to do this through their own cognitive structures. Because students not only have different skill levels, but also different cognitive structures, we cannot continue a “one-size-fits-all” approach to teaching. Certainly, many upper-classes are in small groups. However, Cooperative Learning is not about merely having students in small groups, but about being involved in a structured learning environment that promotes cooperation.

Students construct knowledge and skills actively, not passively. Learning is an activity within the control of the learner. Learners must be actively involved in the classroom in order to bring forth their existing cognitive structures or to construct new ones. Learning is not a spectator sport, yet we know that in whole class questioning, students respond only 50 percent of the time.

Faculties aim their efforts at developing students' competencies and talents. Law schools should be “adding value” to students' skills and ability. That “added value” should be based on cultivating and developing all students. Instead, law faculty and law schools engage in a process of quality control reliant upon selection and weeding out. That is, law schools equate the quality of students education not with the educational process, but the admission process. Median LSAT and UGPA become the measures of quality. Law schools admit the highest achieving students possible and become a holding ground for most of the other students. Law schools give almost no attention to developing law students with marginal skills. Once admitted, law schools attempt to assure quality by “weeding out” the “unqualified.” Many law professors look at a student's failure as evidence of the student's lack of intellectual ability to be an attorney. Few professors take students' failures as evidence of the failure of the educational process. Under the new paradigm, law professors would monitor the performance of students throughout the semester, provide help and support when students falter, examine educational and teaching practices when students fail, and modify practices to prevent student failures in the future. Under the new legal paradigm, law schools would not focus on classifying and sorting students into categories seen as fixed and unaffected by effort and by education. Law schools would focus on developing the potential of all students.

Education is a personal transaction. Education, by its nature, is a social process that we cannot effectively conduct except through interpersonal interaction. The law school must become a community of committed scholars by building personal relationships with students. Law schools must create the conditions where individuals have the necessary social support to achieve. This is particularly important because law students are under significant pressure to achieve. The knowledge is difficult to learn, the skills are hard to develop, and many law students cope in inappropriate ways.

Only a Cooperative Learning environment can achieve all of the above. The competitive environment of the law school causes students to reduce communication with each other and faculty and to provide other students with misleading and false information. Many professors and students view helping or receiving help as cheating or as spoon-feeding. Students are isolated, and the relationship between professors and students is often negative. Competitive and individualistic learning situations discourage “active construction of knowledge and the development of talent by isolating students and creating negative relationships between classmates and with instructors.”

Teaching is the complex application of theory and research that requires considerable instructor training and continuous refinement of teaching skills and procedures. The new paradigm would require professors to view the development of teaching skills as a lifetime effort. Helping students construct their own knowledge and develop their own skills, in an active, cooperative way with classmates, requires training and skill development.