The ALI-ABA and ACLEA just released its final recommendations from its Critical Issues Summit, and it follows the ABA's path toward outcome-oriented law school curricula. Although not as strongly worded as Prof. Rounds' critique, the authors make it clear that preparing lawyers for practice should be the goal of legal education, not fostering an environment for faculty scholarship. The report also suggests law faculty need to gain teaching skills for effective adult learning.

If you recall my previous post on the latest research in adult learning, memorizing facts does not produce the best learning results - challenging one's assumptions does. My beef with my first-year law classes was the lack of context. Although we weren't learning by rote, there wasn't a lot of weaving together of different concepts, or opportunity to reflect on what we were learning and how that would help us become effective lawyers. In my wellness workshops for law students, I suggest that they add a "Why?" section to their case briefs, to keep curiosity as part of their learning.