Week 4 Reading and Class Reflection

Readings

This week’s readings addressed learning environments and formative assessments. While the learning environments reading was interesting (particularly the history of literacy standards) a lot of it wasn’t very relevant to what I’ll be doing in my career. Legal education has a lot of traditions, and I not only don’t think I could change the system in response to ideas about learner-centered environments, I don’t think I’d want to. However, the Sadler reading seemed very relevant in some respects, and I found some parts of it thought-provoking.

Reading about formative and summative assessment, and the merits of different kinds of assessment or evaluation in a learning environment, I struggled a little to reconcile some of the ideas to my own experiences in education and my future in academic law librarianship. There have been some situations, during my undergrad as an English major or in a couple of SI classes, in which I think the focus was truly on mastery learning. But the most formative educational experience I’ve had was law school, and that initially seems like the antithesis of mastery learning, at least on a class-by-class basis.

Most law school classes follow the same template: courses are taught by lecture, usually Socratic (with varying degrees of malice and schadenfreude, depending on the professor) and grades are decided by a single exam at the end of the semester. There is no feedback from the professor during the semester, and even among classmates, there isn’t much of an opportunity to gauge your mastery prior to the exam, because the mandatory curve creates a highly competitive atmosphere that doesn’t encourage collaboration in most cases. This approach to education is actually pretty consistent with legal practice as a whole; a professor once told me that, as lawyers, we had to develop a “bathtub memory” that we could fill with the relevant area of law when needed, and then just as quickly empty to make room for the next batch of knowledge. No one can hold everything that she’ll need to know in her head throughout her legal education and practice, so the goal is to learn quickly, have excellent short-term recall, and then let go of the information when it’s no longer necessary.

This would seem to facilitate the opposite of mastery learning, and that’s not an inaccurate way to view it, if you’re just talking about a single class in Torts or Property. But if you view law school as an entire educational experience, with the goal being information literacy (in terms of being able to research law effectively) and the development of that bathtub memory, then final exams (as well as the sample briefs and memos written in legal research classes) can be take on the characteristics of a formative assessment, with each one serving as a gauge of your progress in “thinking like a lawyer.” Successful law school graduates will have mastered that skill by the time they graduate.

What does this mean for me, as a future law librarian? My role in instruction will probably be minimal; at best, I’ll teach some legal research and writing classes, or assist students at the reference desk. But being able to view law school in the framework of a series of formative assessments does provide a wider perspective on the significance of those tasks, and I think that’s a perspective that a lot of law students could benefit from as well.

Last week’s class

I liked seeing other people’s podcasts, but what I liked even more was listening to my fellow students assess them. No one is actually as critical of other people’s work as they are of their own, and I think it’s easier to approach your own task with minimal anxiety when you know that you won’t be held to the same standards that your inner evaluator has.

The discussion of information literacy and its meaning was helpful in some ways, although trying to craft new definitions of it that didn’t use “use” felt more like an exercise in diplomacy and compromise than anything else. But I think being exposed to the ways that people in other sub-specialties—like public or k-12 librarians—view information literacy is valuable, because those are perspectives that might never occur to me alone.