Teaching

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OK.  I know it’s not yet quite time to panic about syllabi and such for the fall semester.  But that first day of class does approach, and I know some of you out there have already given some thought to innovating your teaching for the fall.  Maybe you’re new to teaching or teaching a new (or new-to-you) course.  Maybe you’re trying to spice up or change the direction of a course you’ve taught for a while.  Maybe this post will give you some new food for thought . . . .

For a number of years, my colleague George Kuney, the Director of the business law center at UT Law, has asked students to invest in a particular Chapter 11 bankruptcy case as a capstone experience in his Bankruptcy and Reorganizations course.  The students, working in pairs or small groups,  are required to review all of the documents in the case docket and provide summaries that integrate those filings with learning from the course and supplemental research.  George makes the resulting case studies available to the public.  The cumulation of case studies created by students in this course has gotten quite impressive over the years.  And the case studies get significant readership.

I…

I am still at Berle VIII with Haskell Murray and Anne Tucker.  One more day of my June Scholarship and Teaching Tour to go–and I have a final presentation to do.  Then, back to Knoxville to stay until late in July.  Whew!

As you may recall or know, my Berle appearance this week follows closely on the heels of a talk on the same work (on corporate purpose and litigation risk in publicly held U.S. benefit corporations) that I made at last week’s 2016 National Business Law Scholars conference.  While I am thinking about this conference, please join me in saving the date for the next one:  the 2017 National Business Law Scholars conference.  Next year’s conference will be held June 8-9 at The University of Utah S. J. Quinney College of Law, with Jeff Schwartz hosting.  I will post more information and the call for papers, etc. once I have it.

This past week, I completed the second leg of my June Scholarship and Teaching Tour.  My time at “Method in the Madness: The Art and Science of Teaching Transactional Law and Skills” at Emory University School of Law last week was two days well spent.  I had a great time talking to attendees about my bylaw drafting module for our transaction simulation course, Representing Enterprises, and listening to others talk about their transactional law and skills teaching.  Great stuff.

This week’s portion of my academic tour begins with a teaching whistle-stop at the Nashville School of Law on Friday, continues with attendance (with my husband) at a former student’s wedding in Nashville on Saturday evening, and ends (my husband and I hope) with Sunday brunch out with our son (and his girlfriend if she is available).  Specifically, on Friday, I teach BARBRI for four hours in a live lecture.  The topics?  Well, I drew a short straw on that.  I teach agency, unincorporated business associations (including a bit about both extant limited liability statutes in Tennessee), and personal property–all in four hours.  Ugh.  Although I am paid for the lecture and my expenses are covered, I would not have taken (and would not continue to take) this gig if I…

I have been following Professor Angela Duckworth’s work on grit for well over a year, so I was eager to read her new book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I bought and read a book within a few weeks of it being published.  

The book is an easy read, written for a for a popular audience, and I was able to finish it in three relatively short sittings.

Below, I reflect on the book, hopefully in a balanced way. 

Thesis. As may be evident from previous posts of mine, I like Duckworth’s thesis – essentially, that passion and perseverance in pursuit of long-term goals are important in achieving success. Duckworth is careful to caveat her thesis, noting at hard work and passion are important, but are not the only factors that matter in achieving success. With this caveat, her thesis seems rather obvious and uninteresting.

Grit Scale. The Grit Scale Duckworth created for her studies seems easy to fake, and to her credit, she admits that it can be faked, like most self-reporting measures. Given the ability to fake the Grit Scale, I am not sure that it would be of much…

The first part of my June scholarship and teaching tour is now done.  Having just returned from the Law and Society Association conference in New Orleans (about which I will say more in later posts), I now am preparing for my presentation on Friday at “Method in the Madness: The Art and Science of Teaching Transactional Law and Skills,” this year’s conference hosted by Emory University School of Law’s Center for Transactional Law and Practice.  Emory Law convenes these conferences every other year.  The conferences always focus on teaching transactional business law and skills.

Here’s the abstract for my presentation:

Drafting Corporate Bylaws: From Alpha to Omega

The archetypal introductory law school course in business associations law characteristically introduces students to corporate bylaws. Typically, course references to corporate bylaws occur in the context of corporate formation and in cases construing corporate bylaws in the context of private ordering, fundamental corporate changes, and the like. Treatment of the subject is necessarily somewhat superficial and episodic. Although students may be exposed to bylaw provisions and even, in some cases, a sample set of corporate bylaws, little time exists in the standard basic Business Associations course to address the optimal drafting process for drafting organic documents…

I recently finished Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (2016) by Angela Duckworth (Penn Psychology).

Next week, I will post some reflections on the contents of the book, but for now, I would like to discuss professors publishing for a popular audience. Tongue-twisting alliteration unintended.  

I am thankful that Duckworth wrote this book for a popular audience rather than in a way that would target a narrow slice of academia. Even as a professor myself, I find books written for popular audience easier to digest, especially if in a different discipline. While popular press books often oversimplify, I would rather a professor author a popular press book on her studies (and studies in her field) than have a journalist attempt to explain them. Also, while a popular press book may oversimplify, professors tend to be intentional about avoiding claims that are too sweeping. Note that in this interview, like the book, Duckworth is careful to state that grit is not the only thing that contributes to success. Finally, especially when the professor has done the background academic work first, as Duckworth did in many peer-reviewed journal articles, a popular press book can reach more people and inspire change and may…

This year, my research and writing season has started off with a bang.  While grading papers and exams earlier this month, I finished writing one symposium piece and first-round-edited another.  Today, I will put the final touches on PowerPoint slides for a presentation I give the second week in June (submission is required today for those) and start working on slides for the presentation I will give Friday.

All of this sets into motion a summer concert conference, Barbri, and symposium tour that (somewhere along the line) got a bit complicated.  Here are the cities and dates:

New Orleans, LA – June 2-5
Atlanta, GA – June 10-11
Nashville, TN – June 17
Chicago, IL – June 23-24
Seattle, WA – June 27

I know some of my co-bloggers are joining me along the way.  I look forward to seeing them.  Each week, I will keep you posted on current events as best I can while managing the research and writing and presentation preparations.  The topics of my summer research and teaching run the gamut from insider trading (through by-law drafting, agency, unincorporated business associations, personal property, and benefit corporations) to crowdfunding.  A nice round lot.

This coming week, I will be at the Law and Society Association annual conference.  My presentation at this conference relates to an early-stage project on U.S. insider trading cases.  The title and abstract for the project and the currently envisioned initial paper (which I would, of course, already change in a number of ways) are as follows:

A few months ago, Inside Higher Ed ran a story that noted “that grades continue to rise and that A is the most common grade earned at all kinds of colleges.” (emphasis added).  This finding surprised me. I knew grade inflation was becoming more and more common, but I did not expect A to be the most common grade earned, especially in the undergraduate setting.

The article reported that A’s accounted for “more than 42 percent of grades” and “A’s are now three times more common than they were in 1960.” (emphasis added).

This grade inflation trend is a mistake, in my opinion. And it is a trend that is impacting graduate schools as well. At the law school I attended, they moved from a 100-point scale and a 78-point mean when I attended, to letter grades and a much higher mean GPA. I understand why my alma mater made the move; they were very different than other law schools, even at the time, and a student with an 85% average had a tendency to be discounted by employers, even if that person was in the top 10% of her class. Business graduate schools may well have led the grade…

It is that time of year again when law profs are up to their ears in grading exams. (Unless one teaches on the continent, where exams are oral.) Given my location in the UK, I thought I would provide a few insights on what we do here.  These are my own personal reflections and I may not be able to generalise about what gets done across the board, though in the UK we probably have more uniformity of policies among law schools and universities generally than in the US. What I am about to say is nowhere near complete in coverage. I want to focus here only on some differences which caught my particular attention as an American teaching in the UK.

Preliminarily, we don’t use the word “grading.”  The term is “marking.” This is terminological. They mean the same thing. I’ll stick to the American terminology here.

We allocate grading and just about every other task to be done in a British law school through something called a “workload allocation.” A workload allocation is a bit of distributive justice. It is meant to allocate work in the school fairly among all faculty (we say staff but I’ll stick to the US word). So, if you are called upon to chair a busy committee, you get credit for that in the workload. The workload will include time for you to do scholarship if scholarship is part of your job.

Here comes the interesting part for those of you saddled with large classes and large amounts of exam grading: exam grading is also subject to the workload allocation. You may be asked to grade in a course (a ‘module’) you did not teach.

Some time ago, I wrote the post Better Teaching Idea: Try to Notice When the Wind Is at Your Back. That post emerged from some observations while running, and today’s post has the same origin.

This month I have been trying to up my miles again for no particular reason. I don’t run for races. I run to run. And to feel like I am at least doing something to stay in some semblance of good shape (it’s not really working).  I now run 4 miles most days. Maybe a little more or less, but that’s the norm this month.  The past two days, I ran from my house, which is at the top of a hill. It is more of a mountain when I am running up it. (I promise, I am getting somewhere with this.)  

I often go down to the rail trail along the river, which is a mostly flat, pretty place to run.  The last two days, I have been running from my house. This means that if I want to get any distance in, I need to go down the mountain.  And, of course, it means I need to get back to the top.  Now, I…