Academic

Last month I mentioned reading Drive by Daniel Pink. Although I found the book frustrating in the way I often find business advice books frustrating, I also found myself thinking a lot about how to improve the teaching of law students. This post contains some recent musings ...

Here is the core idea of Pink's book: "The secret to high performance and satisfaction?at work, at school, and at home?is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world."

This seems right to me.

So I have been noodling with ways one might use this insight in legal education. The bit about directing our own lives is captured by the word "autonomy," so I was intrigued to hear someone yesterday blame the unhappiness of law students on "lack of autonomy." The person was referring to a study by Kennon Sheldon and Lawrence Krieger entitled Understanding the Negative Effects of Legal Education on Law Students: A Longitudinal Test of Self-Determination Theory, 33 Personality & Soc. Psychol. Bull. 883 (2007). You can find the study online here. The punchline:

Student reports of greater perceived autonomy support by faculty predicted less radical declines in need satisfaction, which in turn predicted better well-being in the 3rd year and also a higher grade point average, better bar exam results, and more self determined motivation for the first job after graduation.

The notion of "autonomy support" is doing the heavy lifting here, so let's take a closer look as this concept:

Autonomy support has three prototypical features: (a) choice provision, in which the authority provides subordinates with as much choice as possible within the constraints of the task and situation; (b) meaningful rationale provision, in which the authority explains the situation in cases where no choice can be provided; and (c) perspective taking, in which the authority shows that he or she is aware of, and cares about, the point of view of the subordinate.

The implications of Sheldon and Krieger for legal education continue to be worked out, but I suspect that most law professors rely primarily on (b) and (c), if they provide autonomy support at all. But I am interested in (a). Can we do more autonomy support of that variety?

I was drawn to this feature of autonomy support in part by watching my oldest son navigate his freshman year of college last year. He is part engineer and part artist, and he was drawn to BYU's excellent design program. The program begins with a "freshman core" -- 16 credits of courses that serve as a foundation for the major. Students who complete the freshman core may submit an application for the major, and only about half of the students are allowed to proceed. Admissions decisions are based on a portfolio of each student's work, submitted at the conclusion of the freshman core.

What intrigued me about the program is the way in which the students developed their portfolios. In their core classes, they were given design assignments, often fairly open-ended, that the students completed in a process of give and take with their instructors and the other students. My son was forever tinkering with his projects as he received feedback and learned new techniques. At the end of the year, the students assembled their portfolios, selecting their best 20 pieces to be judged by the design faculty. For the students, the ultimate goal of that first year is to demonstrate the potential to become an accomplished designer. The important point for present purposes is that the students had a great deal of control over how they made that demonstration.

I am not suggesting that law schools copy this model, but perhaps some of the elements of the model could serve as inspiration? Two autonomy-supporting elements stand out to me: (1) the assignments did not have a "model answer," but were crafted to encourage a combination of creativity and technical skill; and (2) at the end of the training, students selected the pieces of their work product that best exhibited their potential as a designer. 

The first element may be difficult to replicate in legal education, though I believe that scholarly papers and transactional projects lend themselves to this sort of assignment better than the classic law school hypothetical. The second element intrigues me. Could we ask our students in Business Organizations, for example, to create a portfolio of work that would demonstrate their mastery of the field? While I suspect that some law students would crumble under a system that emphasized autonomy support in this way (just tell me what you want!), others would thrive.

By the way, if you don't want to read Pink's book, you might find his TED talk a useful entree: