What is Smart Casual all about?
For a short and sweet introduction, check out this overview of the Smart Casual project. It covers the needs that we set out to address, our approach to working with the diversity of Australian law schools, and the suite of Smart Casual professional development modules – all on a single page! You can download the Smart Casual overview here (2MB PDF).
On 26 September, Nat Skead and Mary Heath went to the LEAD meeting hosted by Flinders University in Adelaide. It is a pleasure to share the Smart Casual resources with people in roles with responsibility for sessional teachers and professional development in law. They are designed to address an unmet need for discipline specific professional development on teaching legal skills. The Associate Deans were welcoming and enthusiastic.
Some schools are already using the modules with sessional and permanent staff, or have plans to use them in the near future. At one school, for example, staff will undertake the modules over 12 months like a book club, getting together regularly to discuss and reflect.
There were questions about where to find support for managing sessional staff and ensuring best practice from the school and university. One good place to go is the BLASST project, which has established benchmarking standards and best practice guides for employing and supporting sessional staff.
There were also queries about whether the modules would be of use to permanent law staff, staff teaching law to business students, or teachers in other disciplines. We already have reports of the modules being appreciated by staff outside of law (despite the law examples), as well as by staff in law, no matter their employment status. Many of the modules (for example, Feedback, Communication and collaboration, Wellbeing, Engagement, and Problem solving) will be immediately relevant to staff teaching law to non-law students.
We were also asked about strategies to overcome staff resistance to professional development on the part of people who clearly are experts in their fields of research or practice. We have no magic wand embedded in the modules. Sorry! However, it is important for all content experts to remember that teaching requires a set of skills that is only partly about content knowledge; and that the skills most experts have internalised and now take for grated must be broken down into logically organised component parts in order for them to be communicated to novices. The modules are designed to assist in this process.
One suggestion for the time-pressed teacher offered by the LEADrs themselves was to use a single module as a ‘gateway’; letting sessional staff know that they don’t need to do an entire module all at once but can dip in and out. The online navigational aids embedded in the modules make viewing a module bit by bit very simple. Time-pressed permanent staff have certainly been known to do exactly this. There are entire books devoted to tips for higher education teachers, and having one sitting on the desk so that you can read a page or two and try out new ideas or be reminded of good intentions that have not been carried out lately can be of value to everyone.
We took the Smart Casual modules for a viewing by other disciplines at the HERGA conference: From Research and Policy into Practice on 23 September 2016. Our hope was to share the model we have developed in Smart Casual with people from other disciplines who also want to be able to provide discipline specific professional development for sessional staff.
The HERGA conference arises from collaboartion between all three South Australian public universities and TAFE SA as well as several other education providers from around the state. It is a great opportunity to meet passionate teachers and scholars of learning and teaching. This year the keynote speaker was Simon Barrie from UWS, whose focus on how we should respond to disruption was timely, bracing and extremely interesting.
The Smart Casual session was well attended by people from a large number of disciplines. This is the panel chair introducing the presentation. It was clear from the audience reaction that many disciplines recognise the steep rise in casualisation as well as the precarity of sessional teachers’ employment and the need to ensure sessional staff get access to resources, support and professional development. Questions afterward canvassed access to the resources we have created, the level of web development that has been involved in them, opportunities for people using the modules to be involved in interactive environments, and so much more. Some people present at the session have already been in touch seeking further information and wishing to stay in touch.
Having been presented earlier in the year, this paper is now available in Research and Development in Higher Education: The Shape of Higher Education Vol. 39 as Mark Israel, Natalie Skead, Anne Hewitt, Mary Heath, Kate Galloway, Alex Steel, Fostering ‘Quiet Inclusion’: Interaction and Diversity in the Australian Law Classroom. Presentation to Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia Conference, Fremantle, Australia, 5 July 2016. It can also be found here.
One of the requests we have had from a lot of sessional law teachers is for advice about creating lesson plans. I am sure there are a lot of different ways to approach planning out a class. Here are some thoughts about how I approach it, focusing on classes in which a problem question or hypothetical is the focus of the time spent in the class, and on a face to face context for teaching.
I have several goals in planning out a class. Some are entirely prosaic. First, I want to make sure that I don’t forget to tell students about a crucial date or an upcoming event, or I want to make sure I have established groups for a task that will take place in the following week. If a written document is expected in the following class, I make sure I will remind students about it.
Depending on the class, I might also have a list of needed equipment. Water for a two hour lecture? Whiteboard markers? Recording device? Handouts? USB drive?
Having a written plan allows me to think in advance about what sequence of activities and information will make best sense from the point of view of the class and to ensure I will be reminded to adopt that sequence and not the one that seems natural to me. If I hope that students will connect what we did last week with what we are doing this week, I need to make that explicit, and setting that up as an early element of the class in my lesson plan is part of that process. If am aware of links between content in my subject and the topic being taught in another subject to the same cohort, I will create triggers for making that connection overt in my class plan. For me, one example would be reminding students in my first year criminal law class that they have been learning structured problem solving in their legal skills topic and that this is a great place to apply them. If I want to include a summary of this week’s key points, I need to schedule that in my plan.
I also like to have a map of key content and skills to be covered in the class, set out in a logical and structured form. Sometimes I create this by creating a table with the elements of the main offence being addressed on the left, the key precedents we will apply in the centre, and some prompts about the scenario on the right. Sometimes it might look more like a checklist. Provided it keeps me on track, ensuring that I don’t miss some elements out or–when I am teaching many repeats, forget which class I taught this point to already–it is doing its job.
Time management can be crucial. It took me a lot of years of teaching to be confident about managing the content of a class within the allotted time, given how diverse and unpredictable the interactions in my classes can be, even when they apparently cover the same material. If time management is a big concern for me I will have decided in advance which elements of my plan are crucial and need to be covered, which are optional and can be dropped if time does not allow, and what options I might have for delivering content more time efficiently if the class turns out to need more time spent on something I did not predict would be time consuming.
For me, though, the most important aspect of pre-planning a class is thinking about engaging learning activities and planning time in such a way as to make sure that they are not routinely dropped in favour of passive (for students) content delivery (by me) that is unlikely to provide an optimal learning environment for students. I will figure out in advance whether ice breakers are needed; whether question time might be useful; whether I need to take paper for students to write down their ‘muddiest point‘ or ‘most urgent question’ or to undertake an informal, anonymous survey of how students are experiencing the class. I will decide whether I should break the class up into prosecution and defence to prepare arguments, and if so, for the entirety of the problem or for smaller chunks of content.
I would encourage discussion among teachers who are teaching the same subject about how to approach running the class itself and what kind of lesson plan the person who is leading the teaching team would expect to follow or for the team to be following. Different institutions and different staff experience differing expectations, levels of support and levels of autonomy.
How do you plan your classes? How do you plan for online teaching interactions?
This was originally posted on Kate Galloway’s blog.
The legal profession has been concerned for some time with the capability of law graduates for transnational practice. While much of the discussion in the context of the Australian legal profession has centered on knowledge, for example of private international law, there is inevitably an array of skills and attitudes that must accompany such knowledge to develop what might be called the global lawyer. This post teases out what those skills and attitudes might look like.
Contemporary (and future) Australian law graduates have opportunities in global lawyering in a few different ways. As lawyers in domestic Australian jurisdictions, their clients will increasingly face an international law landscape. This occurs through the imposition of international standards in domestic contexts, or through increasingly globalised trade relations which themselves attract international and transnational jurisdiction. Of note also is the likelihood of an international client-base, requiring lawyers adept in providing effective professional services to an increasingly diverse clientele.
The growth in law firms that are themselves international with an Australian presence, likewise afford graduates the opportunity for international transfers to practice in other jurisdictions, and also to collaborate internationally within the firm. Similarly there are a number of Australian agencies and NGOs that operate globally, and which call for qualified Australian lawyers who can practise in diverse contexts.
A third option is for Australian lawyers to take themselves overseas and qualify in offshore jurisdictions.
The concerns of the profession probably focus on the first two of these examples but it is now widely accepted that law schools must prepare our graduates for all three – in addition of course to ensuring the community is served by good quality lawyers who are skilled in Australian law and legal practice.
The Bentley and Squelch Report identifies four methods of curriculum design to ‘internationalise’ the law curriculum: aggregation, integration, segregation, and immersion. I am interested here in a slightly different way of conceptualising the internationalised law curriculum: designing a capstone to facilitate our students’ transition into the global lawyer graduate, and I have been thinking about this in collaboration with Professor Paula Gerber and Melissa Castan, both of Monash University.
Borderless practice
The premise for a discrete subject focussing on the global lawyer is to engage students in thinking about ‘borderless practice’. The components of transnational practice include an understanding of comparative legal practice, comparative legal processes, cross-cultural competencies, and digitally-mediated global information flows.
While comparative law is its own recognised field, the focus on setting a foundation for a global lawyer is to appreciate diverse legal process and the cultural context within which that process occurs. The Australian justice system is a departure point for an overview of diverse comparative litigation practice, overlaid with international arbitration and public law process.
Without interrogating the rules of civil procedure globally, the goal is to raise awareness in students of diverse justice systems and to inculcate open-mindedness to variations in procedure and the implications for practice. The process of questioning and investigating other jurisdictions models an approach to thinking about legal process as a precursor to learning the rules themselves. It also is the opening for investigating culture: not in a vacuum, but as it relates to the lawyer’s practice, their relationship with colleagues, with clients, and with the community they serve – wherever that might be.
Cultural competency can be dealt with on two levels. The first is raising student consciousness of cultural differences and how this affects both communication and the role of the lawyer. The second relates to the interaction between identity – often the subject of human rights – and culture. This itself has two dimensions: how the lawyer can protect human rights in culturally diverse contexts, and how the lawyer’s own identity is perceived within diverse cultural and legal contexts. The global lawyer requires insight into their own impact as a lawyer and a person.
An emerging cultural context is the use and application of digital technologies. They demand their own competencies in facilitating communication, and in making choices about their use. The global lawyer is adept at managing their digital footprint. They have a mind to the effective management of information in accordance with professional and ethical norms regardless of jurisdiction. They have skills in manipulating information using diverse digital tools as a means of communication and an expression of the client’s needs and of the law itself.
In one sense, in an increasingly globalised world every lawyer is ‘global’. Increasingly open access to the law itself, mass communication and global connectivity potentially projects each of us into a global community. Building on the significant work already done in Australian legal education on an internationalised curriculum, legal educators need now to consider how they design curriculum that keeps pace with, or indeed leads, in the question of broad – global – graduate competencies.
Alysia Blackham from Melbourne University is currently mid-way through a project funded by the UK Legal Education Research Network looking at casualised law teaching. As part of the project, she has developed a survey for law school staff (both sessional and permanent) and administrators to look at conditions of employment, and how they might be linked to teaching and learning outcomes. She is extremely keen to find more participants who are themselves sessional/casual academics. Should you wish to participate in the research study, you can find details listed below.
Dear colleagues
A survey is being conducted of law academics in Australia and the UK, to consider individual experiences of working in legal academia, and the institutional impact of how academic work is structured. This survey is part of a collaborative international study, which will survey both legal academics (including permanent, sessional and contract staff) and law faculty administrators (such as heads of school or executive administrative officers). It is being conducted as part of a project funded by the UK Legal Education Research Network, and led by Dr Alysia Blackham of Melbourne Law School and the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge, and Dr Shelda Debowski, a Senior Consultant in Higher Education Development. This survey will offer important insights into how legal academics are operating in a contemporary higher education environment, and how they can best be supported in their role.
We have been asked to invite you to participate in the survey, which should take no more than 20 minutes to complete. The survey can be accessed online:
If you have any questions or comments about this survey, please contact Alysia Blackham at alysia.blackham@unimelb.edu.au or Shelda Debowski at shelda@debowski.com.au. This research project has been approved by the Human Research Ethics Committee of The University of Melbourne (ID number 1646355.1). If you have any concerns or complaints about the conduct of this research project, which you do not wish to discuss with the research team, you should contact the Manager, Human Research Ethics, Office for Research Ethics and Integrity, University of Melbourne, VIC 3010. Tel: +61 3 8344 2073 or Fax: +61 3 9347 6739 or Email: HumanEthics-complaints@unimelb.edu.au. All complaints will be treated confidentially. In any correspondence please provide the name of the research team or the name or ethics ID number of the research project.
I woke recently to a twitter feed filled with news from the International Legal Ethics Conference in New York. There were a few sessions that really interested me, and I captured the tweets in a series on Storify. (This is the third of four posts.)
As law teachers grapple with the nature and purpose of legal education, it is instructive to consider the diverse roles of the lawyer, including roles that may not have been available when we ourselves graduated. Now, with increasing opportunities for law student and graduate internships with international agencies, the role of lawyer in an international security crisis need not be the stuff of the imagination.
I was interested to see the ILEC twitter feed on this topic, highlighting the ethical and professional issues for lawyers in just these circumstances.
In June, Natalie Skead took our Smart Casual project to the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s inaugural Conference on Teaching and Learning in Law Conference. With ‘Directions in Legal Education’ as the theme the conference provided a perfect platform to showcase the strides the Smart Casual team is making in supporting sessional law teaching in a rapidly changing legal education landscape.
Further afield, in July, Alex Steel presented Smart Casual to the home of Jazz and Blues, New Orleans. Stay tuned for Alex’s update.
I woke recently to a twitter feed filled with news from the International Legal Ethics Conference in New York. There were a few sessions that really interested me, and I captured the tweets in a series on Storify. (The first in a series of four.)
smartcasuallaw 