Achieving the American Bar Association's Pedagogy Mandate: Empowerment in the Midst of a Perfect Storm

Abstract

The ongoing crisis in legal education has prompted calls for fundamental reform. In August 2014, the American Bar Association responded by implementing new law school accreditation standards that mark a "quantum shift” in our educational philosophy—a new pedagogy mandate that shifts our center from what is taught to what students learn. Of all reform measures, the mandate may be one of the best chances law schools and their graduates have in the face of the “Perform Storm” raging in legal education. Ironically, successful implementation remains an open question, in part because of the traditional nature of law schools and their resistance to change, and in part because law schools may be ill-equipped to respond as a result of the crisis. This article seeks to change the dynamic. It begins by putting the 2014 Standards into historical context and explaining their impact on legal education. The author then moves to discuss full achievement of the mandate. Law schools are encouraged to overcome their resistance to pedagogical innovation and to embrace the mandate as a protective measure. At the same time, the article seeks to empower law professors to be driving forces for change. More specifically, under the ABA’s new “outcomes” approach, professors are expected to create meaningful learning opportunities for students and to assess and improve the effectiveness of those experiences. To assist law professors in this regard, the author introduces a teaching effectiveness framework that was created by experts in education from the National Research Council of the National Academies and adapts it for use in legal education. The legal community has relied on the NRC’s expertise for decades, in a wide range of fields, but the author believes this is the first time NRC expertise has been brought to bear in this context. The NRC is credited for its ability to bring the legal and scientific communities together and to make scientific theories accessible. In this way, the framework is a useful tool for law professors, especially those who are trained attorneys rather than certified educators, and improves the current state of our pedagogy scholarship by placing existing assessment and learning outcomes work in the broader context of modern learning theory and instructional design.