Æ is for Effort

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The semester is over. All going well, my grading will be done by the time this post appears. I am looking forward to the student evaluations, which I made a very pointed pitch to have them complete. It is the second skills-oriented class I have taught and reinforced for me how much focusing on effort matters. Initial feedback from students has only confirmed that I need to be as overt about that as possible.

This class was a mixed writing and research class and was first-year law students, just 11 in my section. It was also my first time teaching this course, so we were, in a sense, all learning. I was so fortunate with my class, who really seemed up for anything.

Check In, Check, Out

My experimentation started on their first day of class, with a 7-question pop quiz. I used Microsoft Forms and had them load up the quiz from the Form-generated QR code to answer. As I explained to them, the quiz was meant to be hard-to-impossible to answer. It was a benchmark quiz, so I was asking them to answer things they should know at the end of the semester.

Most students scored in the middle of the range, which I took as a good sign. The goal was really to see what the difference was at the end of the semester. As you can see, most people improved the number of correct answers, with a few people responding the same. I am going to play around with the questions for next fall, now that I have a better sense of what we will cover and there’s less guesswork on my part.

As we queued up the last iteration of this, right before finals, a student confirmed that this wasn’t for a mark. I reassured them that this was, like so much of the work that they did through the semester, just a measure of effort. In fact, not even that, because the answers would mostly benefit me, tell me how much I had communicated, more than it would them.

I have thought a lot about benchmarking in classes. I posed this question to a colleague once: as law librarians, how do we know what our impact is? If we teach a first year legal research, how do measure that impact against whether they are successful or not on the bar exam? What did we contribute? How much did our guidance make a measurable impact on a self-represented party’s litigation outcome or legal issue resolution? We talk about law library value all the time (2012, 2015, 2017, 2019, etc. ) but it is often more aspirational than actionable.

I’m going to continue to noodle on this benchmark idea. Once I feel confident about a one-semester perspective, I would love to figure out how to have the same students answer a similar quiz at the end of their final term in law school. It would mean expanding this quiz to contemplate the legal research knowledge required for a first-year lawyer rather than a first-year law student. Some of the questions would be keyed just to what I am going to teach them, while others would be geared towards a practitioner’s readiness. Not an ideal set of legal research skills, which is where the bar exam is a failure, but a competence level of legal research skills.

Effort as a Guide

As a manager, I am far more interested in effort than I am in perfection. This is partly because I do not believe in perfection, which I ascribe to a scarcity mindset. Someone who believes they have achieved perfection is fooling themselves and someone whose goal is perfection is risking creating idealized, unachievable goals.

I am a flawed person living in an imperfect world. I don’t believe in a perfect world, for many of the reasons Agent Smith found in The Matrix. This doesn’t mean we don’t work towards the best outcomes—in our relationships, in our growth, in our society—but there will always be more, new work to do. Our cumulative effort is what matters and what makes a difference.

This may sound like a plea to not try. But that’s not what I mean at all. The goal is to do your best at whatever you’re doing, whether you have achieved your intended outcome yet or not. Sometimes you reach your goal and sometimes you don’t. We shouldn’t discount the effort made—whether it’s 85% or otherwise—in the process.

When someone tries something new, I value that effort. When they do something that they question, like following an unquestioned process, I value that effort. Whether it’s something new or something we have always done that way, we learn by doing. But it’s not the doing itself. It’s thinking about what we just did. We can improve that new thing or decide it wasn’t worth doing a second time. We can fix a broken process or discover that the perpetual process has not been working, and we can discard it.

The course was devised very much along the lines of this fantastic publication from the Legal Writing Institute by Amy Vorenberg. I followed the suggestions to build an assessment into each month (September, October, November) and increase the complexity with each one. For my course, there were 3 assessments (memos) and a bunch of other work that I lumped into class participation. The assessments comprised 60% of the score and the class participation was 40%.

I’m not a talker. I don’t remember if I ever was but I’m definitely not now. If anything, I’m innately familiar with working through a trauma that the people around me may or may not know about, and who therefore cannot anticipate the struggles I may be experiencing at any given point. So I understand that students may not want to participate verbally in class for a wide variety of reasons. If I call on someone who has not volunteered by raising a hand, it will be because they have given me cues like eye contact that suggest they may be willing to give it a shot, much as I would in a staff meeting. This meant, though, that I was not going to base any part of the course grade on what people contributed in class and which would, inevitably, be a subjective measure.

I mean, think of it as a professional. Do you only give promotions and raises to the people who speak up in meetings? Or do you look at their other contributions? This is clearer to me when you think about the people who do the operational work day-in and day-out, who do not get to work on big projects that result in special recognition and bonuses. We should always have a way to recognize effort and that effort may only happen behind the scenes, out of our sight.

From that perspective, assessments in education are far easier than performance management in the workplace. I used a mixture of CALI, Thomson Reuters trainings, and Lexis Citation Workstation activities to cover the class participation bases. All of them were optional, as was turning in a draft memo for each of the three key assessments. I mean, I guess turning in the memos was also optional, albeit the outcome would be pretty negative. Someone who attempted the online lesson or prepared a draft and submitted it received the full points, regardless of how well they did. People who didn’t participate did not get the points.

For someone venturing into this space, I would recommend the CALI exercises for first year students that have to do rule synthesis but that focus on sandwiches: what is a sandwich, etc. This was hugely popular with the students—especially because the mostly Chicago-born class had strong feelings about whether a hot dog was a sandwich (no)—and came back throughout the semester. Is a Jimmy John’s Picklewich a sandwich? What about a KFC Doubledown? I would say this bit lasted through a good six weeks of class.

This was valuable to me in a couple of ways. First, all three resources (CALI, TR, Lexis) were scored or resulted in a certificate as soon as the students completed them. I could dig into the details but grading itself was taken care of. Second, students could do it in their own time and many of them repeated a lesson. It was also, frankly, a great way to get first-year students to get regular usage out of some common platforms that we might not have otherwise visited during the semester.

It also helped me approach their grades in a way that is similar to how I would manage staff. You can suggest to someone a course of action but you can’t make them take it. As I said to a family member recently, you can’t make anyone do anything. You can only create an environment where they are more likely to want to do something. In the workplace, it’s often a performance focus: if I accomplish this, I will have performed well and my performance review will reflect that.

You can’t make a person perform well, though. The best you can do is create the environment—give an employee the resources to be successful, introduce a student to skills development that will help them improve their writing or research or what have you—for someone to be successful. With law library professionals and future lawyers, the rest is up to the individual.

I have long thought about autonomy and decision-making as mental muscles. I think it is natural to want to flex them. People who are not used to flexing them—whether due to helicopter parents or micro-managing bosses—may have atrophied muscles. You cannot make someone autonomous any more than you can make them do anything. But I am a strong believer that, given the space and the support, most people want to be autonomous. It will require nurturing but, perhaps more than anything, it requires preparing the soil and ensuring the conditions are right for growth.

What if they opt out? In the case of my students, it didn’t manifest as an issue and most students did most of the assignments. I think that, if I had noticed someone not participating regularly, I would have followed up with them. Not as a nag to complete assignments but to reinforce the impact of not participating. Just as with an employee I would not try to micro manage their activities but rather explain that their performance was based on outcomes. A lack of effort would negatively impact those outcomes.

It may have helped too that there was no curve for this class. Students could earn any grade they wanted, with effort. I have heard from colleagues that their legal research and writing classes are curved, which I think is an abomination. Skills classes should allow every student to achieve as much as they can by rewarding effort.

I am confident that some of the student feedback I receive (and have already received informally) will be that there were either too many outside activities or some of them were less relevant or took too much time. I was surprised how often in these exercises unclear technical formatting would cause a failed score, which I experienced as much as the students. I understand the challenges of verifying online activities but it was more of a hitch than I thought it would be.

Why so heavy on the class participation? I read over the summer a piece I can no longer find. Essentially it made the case, which I agree with, that a grade based largely on one or two assessments creates unnecessary stress. For me, it’s an arbitrary source of anxiety especially when skills development is the goal. For me, a large class participation score that focused on repetitive learning tasks or interactive exercises not only helped create the potential to build skills but it buffered them against a disastrous assessment. The graded element of these activities removed the subjectivity of in-class participation measurement, as well as not having to compel student participation.

Perform Like a Practitioner

I make assumptions about my staff, many of whom have been doing the work for years. In most cases, library staff understand that they have a longer timeline to learn and improve and seek resources. Every so often I make it clear that no one is expecting perfection; improvement is the most important.

I didn’t take that laissez-faire approach with the students. As I prepared for class and interacted with them during class and office hours, I kept an eye on practice competence. In other words, or as the learning objectives for the class set out, it’s about learning. It’s not about mastery (which veers closely to perfectionism in my view). When appropriate, I spelled it out.

At one point, we were talking about the draft memos the students had submitted and a particular aspect of the predictive approach. I stressed to the students that they were not able, could not, write an ideal memo after one semester in law school. It’s about writing the best memo they can, and then continuing to iterate and build on that. My guess, and what I told them, is that they will be highly capable as legal writers after a couple of years in law practice. Law school should be about developing competence that can be continually improved. I got feedback that just verbalizing that made students feel less anxious about their writing.

One thing I will stress more the next time around is the elasticity of law practice when it comes to mistakes. Lawyers make mistakes and have adverse outcomes due to knowledge gaps more than law students probably imagine. It takes a lot to be disciplined by a lawyer regulator for bad lawyering—too much, if you ask me, and far more than is required for court sanctions—and often that requires intention on the part of the lawyer. No one wants their client’s case to be tossed because of the lawyer’s actions. At the same time, the legal system allows for some variance: cases dismissed without prejudice, leave to file amended documents, and so on. Sometimes even a collegial agreement to overlook a mistake or allow for flexibility when everyone is acting in good faith.

There is something to be said for providing that same balance in handling student work, which is what we should be doing when it comes to our operational activities, for that matter. People miss deadlines for good reasons, or make assumptions that turn out to be incorrect. I was in a meeting recently where someone realized they were using an older slide deck draft after they had already presented half of it. No one is going to get fired for that. Mistakes happen.

We’ll see if this approach works over time but I am hoping it will help to build growth mindsets. I understand the tension between helping people to develop on their own terms and other market-driven demands. Students have to lock in their first-year, first-semester grades or potentially miss out on employment and extracurricular opportunities (some of which are over-valued for prestige, frankly, and have very little long-lasting import). Staff need to perform or the library’s or organization’s operations will suffer (sometimes also for short-sighted demands rather than long-term success).

I think that something as simple as benchmarking, where 100% accuracy is not the goal but improvement is, or focusing on effort can support that mindset development. It may not be easy, though. We have a culture where second place is losing, where “participation trophies” are derided. But the only way to get better is to participate and acknowledging that effort is valuable. I have been thinking about how I could use something akin to a challenge coin—a military-style participation trophy, if you will—to provide encouragement beyond the classroom. Something that encourages participation across their time at law school.

Effort will not necessarily result in an A. Not even an Æ! But I think it’s a healthy way to help people develop, whether they’re students or staff. Otherwise, we can create arbitrary and unnecessary anxiety, and unhealthy mindsets, and still fail to meet our primary outcomes.