Igniting Law Teaching—Washington, DC

LegalED

American University Washington College of Law will host @Legaledweb’s Igniting Law Teaching  (a TEDx-styled conference) on March 19-20, 2015. The organizers “will be accepting and reviewing applications on a rolling basis and hope to make all selections by Friday, January 16, 2015.”

Given the current market conditions, law school administrators and faculty are being asked to do more with less — to teach more practical skills, to establish learning outcomes, to provide students with formative assessment, to graduate practice-ready lawyers.  Many of these requests ask members of the academy to stretch beyond our typical ways of teaching and to add more to our curriculum generally and to each individual course.

Recognizing that many professors are not trained to teach in this new way, this conference will gather leading law school educators together for a conference about law school pedagogy.  Each presentation will be videotaped and uploaded to LegalED for professors around the country and the world to watch at their own pace.  Instead of having panels of speakers, the conference will be structured like a TEDx conference. During the conference, each speaker will be asked to stand on the stage alone and speak for anywhere between 5 and 10 minutes, preferably without a podium.  If a podium is used, it is not to read a written script, but to refer to brief notes.  If powerpoint is used, it is mostly for graphics and images, with little text on the screen.

 

About the author

Reference librarian, University of Washington School of Law