The conference was weighted toward clinical and skills faculty in terms of the composition of the panels and the audience. This is not meant as a criticism. My take is that skills faculty have long been engaged in a richer and more meaningful assessment of students than have doctrinal faculty. One way to characterize the increased emphasis on assessment in law school is that the clinicians (and the MacCrate and Carnegie reports) are ascendant. So, it makes some sense that many presentations would give examples of assessment in a skills setting. But if the mission is to change the practices of doctrinal faculty, more of them need to be at conferences like this and more of them need to be present to answer the Big Question, which is taken up in my next post.
Jeff Rensberger
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 4:40 am and is filed under ABA, Assessment, Commentary, Conferences, Law Professors, Law Schools, Student Learning, Teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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More on the Legal Education at the Crossroads conference
The conference was weighted toward clinical and skills faculty in terms of the composition of the panels and the audience. This is not meant as a criticism. My take is that skills faculty have long been engaged in a richer and more meaningful assessment of students than have doctrinal faculty. One way to characterize the increased emphasis on assessment in law school is that the clinicians (and the MacCrate and Carnegie reports) are ascendant. So, it makes some sense that many presentations would give examples of assessment in a skills setting. But if the mission is to change the practices of doctrinal faculty, more of them need to be at conferences like this and more of them need to be present to answer the Big Question, which is taken up in my next post.
Jeff Rensberger
This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 4:40 am and is filed under ABA, Assessment, Commentary, Conferences, Law Professors, Law Schools, Student Learning, Teaching. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.