If prestigious law schools can evolve…

A recent article (free registration required) in the New York Times describes how the country’s most prestigious law schools are taking a close look at their programs… and deciding they are not adequately serving their students.

The Dean of Harvard Law School, Elena Kagan, suspects that “what has been taught and how it has been taught may be ‘embarrassingly disconnected from what anybody does.”

It turns out that K-12 public schools are not alone when they teach to the test.

The Bar Exam, that fear-inducing hurdle required for all who want to be licensed to practice law, primarily measures analytic thinking, and that is what law schools have traditionally taught. Law students “have focused on judicial opinions, explaining why a case was decided in a particular way. But many lawyers today must read laws and regulations that have not been explained by a judge and advise clients on how to comply with them.” Some schools are now requiring students to take a class that teaches how to interpret statutes and regulations.

In addition to rethinking what is taught, many law schools are changing how they teach it. While simulations of practice, such as moot court and mock trial, are common in law schools, some schools are taking a page from medical schools and requiring clinical programs, “in which law students represent real clients under the supervision of professors who are practicing lawyers.” This step to bring law students closer to the actual practice of law by having them serve real clients, while having its risks, is laudable.

So thinks William Sullivan, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation and the lead author of a recent report on legal education that found that law schools were not emphasizing “ethical, interpersonal and other skills that could help… [students] practice law after graduation,” who explains:

‘There is a mode of practical reasoning, of reasoning in situations, which requires that knowledge be constructed and reconstructed to deal with the situation at hand…. and that’s the kind of reasoning that good practitioners develop, and it’s something that we know can be taught, but we know it’s not taught very much.’

Epistemic Games are an effort to show how this type of practical reasoning can be taught, not just in professional schools, but in everyday public schools too. They are simulations, more like moot court than a medical school residency, that teach the skills, knowledge, and epistemologies of innovative professional practices. They are powerful because as simulations, they are extremely faithful while being relatively risk-free. Under the guidance of in-game mentors, players can do their work without grades, job offers, or Christmas bonuses on the line.

It sounds like common sense that schools should prepare kids to solve real problems in the real world, and to do it in a way where the penalties for failure are confined to the simulation. Yet schools still teach disconnected knowledge and skills, evaluate based on tests, and punish students for failure in potentially life-altering ways. They persist in a mode of schooling that was outdated generations ago.

As Ms. Kagan, the Harvard Law Dean, says, ‘when you haven’t changed your curriculum in 150 years, at some point you look around.’

If only public school officials would do the same…