A recent article in the New York Times described benefits of instructional methods that encourage high school students to take more control over their learning.
Young adults say they feel woefully unprepared for life in the work force, and employers say they’re right.
In a survey by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation of more than 4,000 members of Gen Z, 49 percent of respondents said they did not feel prepared for the future. Employers complain that young hires lack initiative, communication skills, problem-solving abilities and resilience.
There’s a reason the system isn’t serving people well, and it goes beyond the usual culprits of social media and Covid. Many recent graduates aren’t able to set targets, take initiative, figure things out and deal with setbacks – because in school and at home they were too rarely afforded any agency.
Giving kids agency doesn’t mean letting them do whatever they want. It doesn’t mean lowering expectations, turning education into entertainment or allowing children to choose their own adventure. It means requiring them to identify and pursue some of their own goals, helping them build strategies to reach those goals, assessing their progress and guiding them to course-correct when they fall short.
The authors cited a large study finding that
Only 33 percent of 10th graders report that they get to develop their own ideas in school. The result? In third grade, 74 percent of kids say they love school. By 10th grade, it’s 26 percent. School feels like prison, many teenagers told us over three years of research. The more time they spend in school, the less they feel like the author of their own lives, so why even try?
Sound familiar?
The authors cited a study finding significant benefits of encouraging students to take more agency in their classes by using the following techniques, among others.
At the start of a lesson, instead of providing a step-by-step schedule and overview for the class period, as many good teachers do, they inquired about the kids’ own interest. They might say, “Today I’m going to tell you about the solar system. Before we start, is there anything about the solar system that you are particularly curious about or have a question about?” This simple step encourages kids to think about what they know, what they care about and what they want to know more about, rather than just settling in and tuning out.
Whadayaknow, this produced real benefits.
The authors conclude
Maybe it’s time to define a higher ideal for education, less about ranking and sorting students on narrow measures of achievement and more about helping young people figure out how to unlock their potential and how to operate in the world. Amid the drumbeat of evolving artificial intelligence, wars, rising authoritarianism, political polarization and digital disconnection, they need to learn a lot more than how to follow instructions.
Promoting Students’ Agency in Law Schools
There are eerie parallels between the experiences of high school and law school students. The recent Building a Better Bar study used the same phrase as the study of high school students – that law students are “woefully unprepared” to work with clients.
Gathering facts from clients was especially challenging for new lawyers. In law school, one new lawyer explained, “they give you a set of facts” and “those are the only facts that exist in the world.” In practice, one lawyer said she had to develop the skill of “getting more facts from the client and knowing which facts to ask for,” as well as the ability to “phrase questions to clients in a way that they understand what kind of information you’re trying to get, and they give you the information that’s actually useful to you.”
Law students mostly learn little disconnected pieces of the law but not how to understand the “big picture” of their cases and act accordingly.
Jaded Law Students
Although some students carefully navigate law school, many students mostly operate on auto-pilot, trying to collect markers of achievement, filling out their resumes to appear appealing to employers. Students often become jaded, recognizing that answering tricky exam questions has little to do with the actual work of legal practice. This can be reinforced by experiences working during law school as they experience a disconnect between law school and actual legal practice.
Law students may feel little opportunity to exercise agency in their studies as they are required to take a substantial number of courses and they may feel obliged to take bar courses. They may select elective courses for many reasons unrelated to their interest in learning particular subjects or skills. These reasons include the reputation of some courses for relatively little work, easy grading, and friendly professors as well as convenient class and exam schedules.
Students take exams in many courses, which require memorization of complex rules and stylized responses following the conventions of exams answers. Even when they write papers for their courses, they may pick topics that seem easy and likely to get good grades.
As a result, many 3Ls act as if they are in prison – like the high school students in the study cited above – and are doing time until their release.
Of course, some students are self-directed and disciplined about their studies. And some faculty do a fabulous job of helping students get motivated. But a lot of students cruise through law school just waiting for their tickets to get punched and get out.
This is not exactly breaking news. Nor is it likely to change significantly, even with changes in bar exams and licensing regimes.
How Can You Help Your Students Exercise More Agency?
The NYT article suggests some techniques that law faculty could use. For example, you can begin classes by asking students what they are particularly curious about or have a question about. You can ask students how they might apply the material when counseling clients or negotiating with counterpart attorneys.
Students would benefit from systematic planning for their education. They might start by using Real Practice System self-assessments to analyze their backgrounds, values, and professional goals, which can provide the basis for planning their studies. This post includes a self-assessment questionnaire for students.
Based on their self-assessments, students might develop portfolios that would guide their curricular and extra-curricular activities and provide employers with evidence of their legal knowledge and skills. Deborah Jones Merritt wrote a wonderful article describing how law students can use portfolios to guide their studies, Pedagogy, Progress, and Portfolios. Here’s how they work:
Professional learning portfolios allow students to map, document, and display their achievements. A good portfolio begins with learning objectives: what information and skills does a student need to master in order to perform as a professional in a particular field? After identifying these learning objectives, students pursue experiences designed to obtain the desired mastery. By documenting these experiences in the portfolio, students both track their progress and identify new learning goals. Finally, students may use the portfolio to display their achievements to employers; a portfolio may include course grades, detailed instructor evaluations, journal entries for clinical work, summaries of extracurricular experiences, writing samples, videotapes of simulated or real practice experiences, and any other information summarizing a student’s learning achievements.
Portfolios thus are more than a means of collecting information; they are part of the learning process. Cognitive scientists recognize that the best education occurs when students embrace specific learning goals, identify concrete steps for achieving those goals, and receive regular feedback on performance. By advancing at least two of these goals, portfolios contribute directly to student learning.
You can encourage students you advise to conduct self-assessments and develop portfolios. If you advise students early in their law school careers, you can monitor their progress and give advice along the way.
In your classes, you can encourage students to do self-assessments and develop portfolios. In some courses, you might require students to do these things. In most courses, you might recommend that they do so, possibly offering to read these documents or give extra credit.
Some schools provide regular advising that require or encourage students to do activities like these. If your school doesn’t do so, you might encourage your deans to consider incorporating them as part of your school’s advising services.