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Hilbert, J; Ver Ploeg, C --- "Project-based learning and ADR education: one model for teaching ADR students to problem solve for real" [2013] LegEdDig 44; (2013) 21(3) Legal Education Digest 44


Project-based learning and ADR education: one model for teaching ADR students to problem solve for real

J Hilbert and C Ver Ploeg

Appalachian Journal of Law, Vol. 11, No.2, 2012, pp 157-184

In 2003, William Mitchell College of Law (William Mitchell) took a leap of faith and offered an experimental course in which interested students were given the opportunity to assume full responsibility for commencing and completing a substantial and complex project for a real client. That opportunity – titled Advanced Alternative Dispute Resolution (Advanced ADR) – had no textbook, no lesson plan, and no teacher’s manual. Instead, the course was premised on the faith that a group of 15 students, most of whom did not know each other, could come together and design, from scratch, a quality dispute resolution procedure for a Fortune 500 company that needed a thoughtful approach to recurring internal disputes. Because that early experiment proved so successful, William Mitchell has continued to offer upper-level students the opportunity to complete their ADR training by undertaking similar work on behalf of new clients.

Generally, ADR education has thrived this past decade as law schools now offer a wide range of interesting and diverse courses on dispute resolution skills. As report after report has documented, the legal profession requires more emphasis on hands-on, interactive learning where students solve problems (and not just read cases) and perform work that is similar to the types of tasks that will be expected of them as lawyers.

While ADR has climbed into the ranks of mainstream legal education, ADR instruction still remains a fairly unique breed. Since the very beginning, ADR courses ‘required new pedagogies [because] [l]aw students do not learn to negotiate, mediate, or arbitrate by responding to Socratic questions in the classroom.’

William Mitchell’s Advanced ADR course is neither a lecture-based course nor a seminar. Rather, it is best viewed as an extended exercise in creative problem-solving. Faculty members leave much of the work to the students, stepping in only to facilitate, inject an occasional dose of reality, and ensure the quality of the students’ final work product. The students’ most apparent challenge is to design an effective dispute resolution process for their client. However, they soon discover that learning how to work together effectively as a group poses an equally important challenge. Project management is central to all that the students do as they conduct legal and field research, meet with their client, draft materials, and make presentations.

Thus, students must work collaboratively throughout the semester to analyse their client’s unique needs and design customised dispute resolution procedures to meet those needs. The client, who in all but the first project has been a non-profit organisation, has genuine and complicated problems.

In this way, the course replicates the practice of law. Lawyers rarely work in isolation. They negotiate, problem solve, meet in committees, and serve on task forces. And they typically do all of those things with strangers.

Many students are uncomfortable that there is no text, no agenda, and no boilerplate model that simply awaits discovery. Consequently, it takes time for the students to realise that they must create a customised process and that no roadmap lies before them.

Thus, it has sometimes been necessary to explain to uneasy students that the challenge of the semester’s project – indeed the challenge of the practice of law – is to figure out what to do when you do not know what to do.

Although students perceive that the faculty members play a largely passive role in the Advanced ADR course, they are actually serving as facilitators who allow the students to self-teach, much like the role a facilitator plays within ADR. In addition, the course demands considerable behind- the-scenes effort.

The greatest challenge has typically been finding the right client. The ideal client is an organisation that experiences recurring, often festering, interpersonal difficulties with leaders that recognise – or are open to considering – the value of developing a thoughtful approach to addressing those problems. Ultimately, the faculty members select the client based on three criteria.

The first criterion is the suitability of the client’s needs for a one-semester student project. Thus, at the outset, the faculty must be confident that a client’s needs will provide a sufficiently solid foundation upon which to base an educational experience.

Although a project’s parameters may not be entirely clear at first, the faculty will typically be able to identify projects that pose too broad of a challenge for a one-semester project.

The second criterion is the availability of the person or persons who will serve as the students’ primary contact or contacts. The client liaison must be someone who understands and can communicate the client’s needs; can be contacted regularly for additional necessary information; will attend a formal mid-semester ‘course check’ to ensure that the students are proceeding in the right direction; will attend the end-of-semester formal presentation; and will assume responsibility for implementing the final work product.

The third criterion is whether the client is a non-profit organisation. Even though our first client was a for-profit organisation, we strongly prefer to provide these services to non-profit organisations. At the beginning of each semester, we impress upon the students that they will be providing a quality work product for which attorneys typically charge, and clients pay, quite high fees. Furthermore, the students can better appreciate the value of their efforts if they are assisting a non-profit organisation, rather than providing their work product for free to a for-profit business that would otherwise pay fair market value.

Ultimately, both the client and the students understand that they are entering into an attorney- client relationship.

Students must understand that enrolling in the Advanced ADR course will require not only initiative and commitment, but also time. Each semester contains 14 three-hour class sessions. Within that framework, the students – who typically do not know each other – must work as a team to complete a quality work product that they will formally present to their client during the 13th week.

Because students hit the deck running on the first day of class, it is helpful to provide them with as much advance information as possible. Soon after registration, each enrolled student receives an email containing general information concerning the course’s new client, available resources, and course grading guidelines.

The ideal enrolment consists of upper-level law school students, most of who will graduate at the end of the semester. Advanced ADR is considered a capstone course in which students have the chance to combine theory with practice. Enrolment, which is now capped at 15 students, has ranged from eight to 25 students. Experience with prior classes demonstrated that high enrolment made it difficult for students to work collectively.

The first class of the semester sets the tone for the entire project. As a small group that must work closely together to complete a challenging task, it is helpful to get to know each other quickly. After the students get comfortable, more details emerge, and this establishes the information sharing process for the whole semester.

Students have met on their own during weekends when doing so was necessary to complete a project and prepare a client’s presentation. Similarly, we remind students that as legal professionals they are required to account for their time because, at the end of the semester, they must submit final logs that detail their individual and committee contributions.

We also reassure the students that it is not unusual to feel lost in the beginning. After all, other students have felt the same way. Thus, our collective goal is to help the students determine, ‘How to figure out what to do when you do not know what to do.’

In the early years, we invited our client to the first class so that the students could get a clearer sense of the project at the outset. Now, we schedule the client to join us during the second class. We have found that it is more productive for faculty members to provide the client’s general information and needs (as we then understand them) so that the students have an opportunity to prepare for their first meeting with the client the following week.

In the Advanced ADR course, the faculty facilitates the students’ work as opposed to using lectures and Socratic examination.

In the end, the faculty must strike the right balance so that the final work product is of high quality and the students have the opportunity to learn and apply key lessons about working together and developing successful dispute resolution programs or processes.

Since inception of the Advanced ADR course, two professors have co-taught it. Team teaching has been a necessary feature of the course for a number of reasons. First, the course does not follow a set lesson plan, so the professors are literally working without a net. Having a second pair of eyes and another set of ideas offers much needed support. Second, each professor brings his or her own unique set of skills and experiences. Third, as students break into different subgroups, the two professors can split their time and provide one-on-one observation and support to more than one subgroup at a time.

Another interesting aspect of team teaching is that it requires that the professors collaborate, just like the students. In some ways, team teaching provides a model to the students of how multiple players can work together on a single project.

Perhaps one of the most challenging issues is to what extent faculty should guide the students in their work. It is often difficult to reconcile learning objectives with the need to complete the project on time and produce a high quality work product for the client. Unlike our counterparts in the formal clinical setting, the Advanced ADR course has at least two built-in advantages that mitigate the urgency of having to intervene in the students’ work. First, the course runs for 14 weeks and the students’ work product is due at the conclusion of the course. There are 14 class periods (plus any other specially scheduled meetings) to resolve and address any issues that come up. Second, the students in the course provide the advantage of having many other voices that can lend an opinion or offer some supervisory assistance. All of the students in the course have taken an ADR survey course and are typically at the end of their law school careers.

Ideally, the faculty fosters the students’ independence and allows them – perhaps with some nudges along the way – to find the right solution at the end of the day. During the semester, the students may grow frustrated with the process and the uncertainty of how to proceed. While this frustration should not be allowed to take over the course, it can be an important part of the learning process. As students wrestle with their discomfort and try to find the right steps to take (or help their colleagues reach the right decision), their disorientation can provide insight into the practice of law in ways that are quite powerful. In some respects, this faith in the students finding their way without significant intervention from the faculty communicates high expectations about what the students can achieve – an important message on the eve of their graduation.

Part of the challenge for the students is finding the right balance for leadership. Even if they work as a group, leadership is critical to keep the group moving and to help resolve the many minor disagreements that can arise on everything from the agenda, direction of the project, or substantive issues. In our experience with the Advanced ADR course, many students are reluctant to take a leading role because they do not want to appear too pushy or adversarial. Indeed, students working out their hierarchy consumes a lot of time in the first few classes.

It can be important to remind the students that although collaboration can often feel like it is taking more time; it is a natural part of the learning process.

One of the first tasks that the students undertake is to break into subgroups. The subgroups are often a product of the first class, where the project is divided into discrete parts that could create enough work for several multi-student groups.

As the subgroups form, the faculty can begin to learn a little about the students, particularly what sort of expertise they bring to the course and what degree of commitment they have to it. Many students have substantial experience in ADR settings either as volunteer mediators, staff at mediation centres, professionals at social service agencies, or other useful backgrounds that contribute enormously to the overall project. As a first step on day one, we have the students introduce themselves, share their background information, and discuss their relevant work experience. This allows the students to assign themselves to appropriate subgroups that might need some of the individual strengths identified.

As the course continues, it is also important that the students learn to critique and rearrange their initial subgroup structure as needed. However, they must also maintain some degree of overall structure and check-in periodically as a large group to ensure that the project is coherent and that there are no major gaps. Toward the end of the class, additional subgroups – such as an editing subgroup or a presentation subgroup – may be needed to generate the final work product.

One key piece of guidance that is required from the faculty is to clarify the agenda and identify the tasks to be completed between each class. For example, at the end of each class, regardless of how the class has been spent (and even whether the entire class time has been used), the faculty and students should spend a few minutes discussing what each group (or individual) will do before the next class.

At the beginning of the following class, the faculty and students should conduct a quick check- in and remind everyone what is planned for that class period. After one or two weeks of having the faculty lead this process, the students will begin to catch on and be able to initiate the conversation at the opening and closing of each class.

In addition to the opening and closing of each class, there must also be a sufficient opportunity for the class as a whole to share information and to report on any new or challenging developments.

While each course project reflects the different needs of its particular client, there are some consistent components with respect to the final work product that is submitted and presented to the client at the conclusion of the course. These components consist of a written manual, presentation, and electronic copies.

The written manual contains the description of the program or process and all forms and other accompanying documents (often in appendices). The forms and other documents include everything from sign-in sheets for participants, to flow charts for users, to marketing materials, which includes brochures, websites, and other outreach materials.

At the end of the class, the client meets with the class for a formal presentation of the project and the manual. The content of the project is highlighted through a PowerPoint presentation or other presentation format. The presentations have usually lasted between 60-90 minutes. The client also receives an electronic copy of the manual so it can be integrated into any other materials that the client uses. The client also receives electronic versions of all the presentation materials, such as the PowerPoint presentation.

The students use the final class to review the process that they used and to reminisce about how the subgroups formed and worked. It is a critical lesson to confirm.

To make the lesson interactive and lasting, the final class should let students lead the discussion by listing the specific things that did and did not work. In addition, the final class is a good time to provide some important positive support for the students before they leave law school. So little of law school is spent on providing feedback, and this is an important time for the students to feel good about their work. Typically, the clients are extremely happy about the work product, so it can be fun to debrief the students on the clients’ satisfaction.

As with all grading in law school, it is imperative that the standards of evaluation are communicated clearly at the beginning of the course. Especially in the Advanced ADR course, where there is no final exam or paper, and the entire grade is based on the participation in the project, students must understand exactly what is expected of them and how they will be measured.

At the end of the semester, the faculty put each student’s name on a piece of paper and independently arranges the slips of paper in order of the value of the student’s contribution to the project. The faculty members then compare and rearrange the rankings until they have reached agreement. Because the students are given substantial feedback and opportunities for improvement throughout the semester, their grades tend to be high in a very small range. This is the ideal because it reflects a quality project to which everyone contributed.

Although each semester’s students and clients have been different, and the Advanced ADR course still feels like working without a net, the students have always welcomed the challenge. The students typically view their real life lawyering as among the most satisfying of their law school experiences.


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