As a teacher, it’s important to keep trying new things. If you don’t find your lessons fresh and exciting, you’ll have a hard time getting students to engage with them. Usually, this experimentation occurs at the margins, but come this fall, I’ll be ripping up the rulebook and teaching an entirely new version of the 1L Research Methods in Law course that I’ve taught for the past five years.
For the past few semesters, a few of my colleagues have teamed up to teach Research Methods in an innovative, experientially-focused format with a shared curriculum. They designed the format to immerse students into the underrated learning activity of actually doing legal research, using longer (but less frequent) class sessions and shifting all “lecture” content to instructional videos that students watch independently. This allowed my colleagues to devote the entirety of these longer class sessions to realistic legal research “simulations” that students work through with occasional assistance from the instructor.
When I heard about this format, it immediately struck a chord with me. This type of real-time, over-the-shoulder instruction can be incredibly effective, but it can be tough to shoehorn it into my limited class time. Despite the appeal, I had been hesitant to sign up. I’ve put an incredible amount of time and energy into developing a version of the course that is (not to brag) excellent, and the prospect of throwing all of that work in favor of such a different approach is intimidating.
The idea of collaborating with my librarian colleagues really helped to win me over to the experiential format. Whenever I discuss teaching with the other librarians, I get new ideas about how to approach the materials. Plus, we all have blind spots, and these serendipitous conversations have helped me mitigate some of mine. But with all of us teaching our own independently developed curriculums, these discussions are not as common as I would like. Because the team will be moving through the same syllabus in lockstep, we will be able to discuss our experiences after most of the classroom sessions.
The collaboration also extends to the planning process. Switching to this new framework has also given us the chance to rethink the syllabus and materials. This is an especially valuable benefit for Research Methods, since the lower number of credit hours always entails hard choices about what to cover. Accordingly, we have been meeting to plan the syllabus using backwards design, with each of us weighing in on the different skills we want students to have learned at the end of the course.
This methodology is a particularly good fit for a skills-based course like ours, and I think it’s even more important when experimenting with the course format. I had used backwards design to develop my syllabus when I started teaching RMIL, but I didn’t necessarily apply it with as much rigor when I made tweaks to the materials in the intervening years, resulting in a somewhat less focused course. Revisiting the entire syllabus with my colleagues should result in a set of materials that work well together.
One strength of our approach is that we all bring something different to the table. All of the librarians on the team are at different stages of their career. As a result, some of us are more in tune with how students experience the course, while others are more aware of how the course fits into broader institutional priorities. And although we are all oriented towards teaching practical skills in a hands-on format, our teaching philosophies do sometimes diverge. So far, this diversity has led to productive and illuminating conversations, but it could be an obstacle in some situations. An outcome-focused planning process should mitigate these problems in the long run. If all of the librarians are on the same page about what we are trying to achieve, the means of getting there should be less controversial.
RIPS Law Librarian Blog 