Many Professors are interested or curious about the Flipped Classroom, but unsure how it works, or what it actually means to "flip" a course in this way. In this video, produced by Peter Sankoff of the University of Alberta, Faculty of Law, with the assistance of students from his flipped Evidence law class from 2015, he breaks down in detail how the class proceeds - from start to finish – by showing what a "mock" class looks like. You'll also hear his thoughts on the flipped classroom, and better yet, the views of students who can tell you whether it works for them. 

http://ualbertalaw.typepad.com/faculty/2016/05/the-flipped-classroom-in-action.html

If you have any comments or questions, feel free to contact Peter at [email protected] .

THE TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION RECOMMENDATIONS ON LEGAL EDUCATION AND ACCESS TO JUSTICE AS CENTRAL THEMES OF THIS YEAR'S CONFERENCE 

Our programme has been finalized and it is an amazing lineup of panels and roundtable discussions, thanks to your stimulating and inspiring proposals. This year’s conference will take place May 30^th-31^st at the University of Calgary Faculty of Law (with our Awards reception on the 29th).

We are dedicating an entire day of the conference to the T&R Commission recommendations on legal education. This will be on the joint day with CLSA (Canadian Law and Society Association), on May 30^th.  Our plenary panel features inspiring scholars Larry Chartrand, Aimée Craft, Sarah Morales, Karen Drake and Rebecca Johnson, who will start the day off by asking difficult questions and guiding us in taking action individually and collectively. The other sessions will incite even more discussion and exchange about implementing the recommendations in different courses and contexts.

Access to justice is another crucial and current issue in the legal profession and in legal education this year, and it is also a central theme of this year’s conference, with three panels running back to back on the second day of our conference.

And of course, as has been CALT’s practice for the last few years, legal education curriculum and pedagogical issues and ideas will be shared and discussed! We’d like to end things with a discussion on creating and maintaining communities of practice, thus hopefully bringing the different discussions while turning to future action.

The CALT and CLSA joint banquet will be held on May 30^th at the Calgary zoo!

Since most of you will be arriving at least on the 29^th (CLSA conference starting on May 28^th), we are hosting a wine and cheese reception on that day at 5pm to honour this year’s recipients of the CALT awards: academic excellence, scholarly paper, and our new scholarship of teaching and learning award.

To register for the conference, see the Congress website (http://congress2016.ca/ ) where you can also find information on travel and accommodation.

You can download the programme by clicking here.

We look forward to seeing you in Calgary!

Annie Rochette

President, Canadian Association of Law Teachers

Welcome to CALT’s new website!!!

We have been busy developing this new website for CALT members and Canadian law teachers. On this site you will find blog posts about legal and legal education topics, teaching and learning resources, postings for jobs and calls for papers, information about our journal and annual conference. But that’s only the start! The beauty of the site lies in its networking possibilities. With this website, we can manage our own communications to different audiences, we can create networks of members teaching in the same area or concerned about specific aspects of legal education, for example. The site is also connected to our Twitter and Facebook accounts, so if you follow us on those accounts, you’ll know of new posts. We can amend the website, add content, update the database without much outside help, which will help us reduce our costs.

New website, new smaller Executive board, new Constitution, new Advisory board, new award!

It is my great pleasure to be writing to you again this year in my capacity as the CALT president, re-elected at the June AGM in Ottawa for a term of two years.  John Kleefeld, from the University of Saskatchewan College of Law, was elected as the Vice-President.  Derek McKee agreed to stay on as our Treasurer for yet another year to ensure a successful transition to the new treasurer (any takers?). Angela Cameron (Ottawa) was elected as Secretary. We have also a small number of members at large: Teresa Scassa and Craig Forecese from the University of Ottawa and Konstantia Koutouki from Université de Montréal. Jennifer Koshan (Calgary) has agreed to be our local organizer for the annual conference 2016 which will be held in Calgary. Sara Ross is our graduate student representative. On behalf of CALT members, I extend a huge thank you to them for volunteering their time. You can see the members of the Executive here.

I would also like to thank the members of last year’s Executive: Shauna Van Praagh (past president, McGill), Gemma Smyth (Windsor), Amar Khoday (Manitoba), Eric Adams (Alberta), Elaine Craig (Dalhousie) and our two graduate student representatives, Vanisha Sukdeo (Osgoode) and Tenille Brown (Ottawa). Some of these members sat on the Executive for a few years, so a huge thank you for your service and dedication to CALT!

At our annual conference in Ottawa, the many members who were present (thank you!) adopted amendments to the CALT Constitution. Some of these changes reflect technological advances (for example communicating via email instead of snail mail(!), being able to consult our Executive via email), and some of them are more substantive. For instance, Executive members are now elected for a term of two years instead of one (although they must renew their membership every year) to ensure continuity and to be able to plan on a two-year basis. The amended Constitution has also created the possibility for an Advisory Board, with representatives at least from every law faculty in the country, chosen by their own institution. If any of you are interested in becoming an Advisory Board member, let us know! We will be putting it together very soon. The Advisory board may hold a couple of meetings per year, but its members will be consulted regularly on specific issues as they come up (mostly via email). They may also help out the Executive on ad hoc matters.

2016 CALT annual conference

The 2016 conference will be held in Calgary, May 30^th-31^st. Building on the Congress theme of “Energizing communities”, the theme for our conference is “Energizing communities through legal education”. We encourage each of you to submit a paper, workshop, panel or roundtable proposal. There are many current issues in law and legal education to discuss, and the CALT conference and policy committees and board are working to create some forums for these discussions. The success of this conference ultimately depends on your participation !  See the Call for papers here.

New Scholarship of teaching and learning award!

On the excellent suggestion of one of our members, we have also created a NEW award to be in line with CALT’s focus on legal education. This new prize will reward scholarship about teaching and learning in law, published or unpublished. You can find out more about this award in the “awards” tab!

2015-2016 plans

Our plans for the 2015-2016 year include the annual conference of course and the usual CALT activities (prizes, annual conference, journal). We are also exploring different options for CALT’s legal status and for membership. Considering the number of law professors in Canada, CALT’s membership base is still far from what it could be, or used to be. As I pointed out last year, our limited membership constitutes a limit as to the activities of CALT. We hope that the new website and the visibility that it creates will help boost membership. But from my conversations with law teachers in different forums, I have also observed that many people think they are automatically members of CALT, or that once they sign up, they are lifetime members of CALT. Wouldn’t that be nice!!! But that is actually not the case.  Every year, you have to renew your commitment to CALT by signing up and paying the modest fees of $75 ($25 for graduate students). With your membership, you get a free paper copy of the journal CLEAR (the Canadian Legal Education Annual Review) sent to you. 

Are you a member of CALT ?

Join here!

I look forward to exchanging ideas about what matters to legal educators in Canada with you throughout this year.

President, Canadian Association of Law Teachers

The CBA Legal Futures Initiative welcomes interventions from scholars, practitioners, law students, and advocates that address:

• New legal disciplines – what training and education will 21stcentury lawyers need?
• New legal environments – how can we train lawyers to work effectively in collaborative and multidisciplinary teams?
• New licencing processes – how can we encourage experimentation in the methods used to prepare new entrants for their call to the bar? 
• Lifelong education – how can professional development meet the needs of lawyers throughout their careers while also ensuring increased competence in the profession? 
• A more representative profession – how can we ensure that law schools and the profession reflect the diversity of Canadian society to a greater extent, and that law school graduates are able to pursue varied career objectives including social justice?
• Bridging theory and practice – how can legal employers and legal educators engage in productive dialogue about matching law school graduates to legal market needs? 
• The relevant lawyer – how does the profession become more relevant to clients?
• Transforming the profession – how can educators encourage innovation amongst lawyers?

The Challenge

Digital natives now comprise a major sector of law school entrants. Don’t be surprised if they appear in your Contracts 101 class this September expecting to use their Apple Watches or Google Glass in learning the law. Such a scenario raises a troubling discrepancy in legal education methodologies: while most students are quite adept with student engagement technologies (SETs) from undergraduate classes, the majority of their law school professors prefer the passive environment of lectures, podiums, and PowerPoint. There might be a variety of reasons for avoiding SETs: apprehension of the technology, the time required for set-up, or fears that techno-wizardry will bog down content-intensive curricula. Some might also hold deep ideological commitment to the timeworn Socratic method.

As the inventory of SETs increases to include both more functional clicker remotes and web-based mobile phones, as well as videos used in the flipped classroom, there is mounting empirical evidence that active learning can address alarmingly short attention spans, improve grades, and close gender and socio-economic gaps. Such benefits raise the ethical question for us all: are we not obligated as law teachers to employ active learning, including SETs, in the best interests of our learners?

Law and Ideas: Research, Teach, Learn, Transform

Our annual conference will take place in Ottawa from June 2-3rd 2015.

Click here to view the conference programme.

Click here for more details and information about how to register.

Click here to learn more about our keynote speaker, Professor Julian Webb, and view his paper abstract.

On May 7th, 2015, I had the pleasure of participating in the Estey Symposium on Experiential and Active Learning in Business Law, organized by Professor Rod Wood, my colleague at the University of Alberta Faculty of Law, and this past year, the visiting Estey Chair in Business Law at the University of Saskatchewan College of Law.

When we think of experiential learning, we tend to think of courses that offer students either actual or simulated experiences in litigation. For example, Prof. Wood, with experienced practitioner Rick Reeson, offers a course on restructuring in which students argue a multi-party chambers application (in front of a real judge!). For those of us teaching in the corporate and commercial law areas, it was interesting to spend a day talking about various ways to give students these kind of experiences in solicitor or transactional work.

Teaching a one-year contracts course for the first time, I solicited feedback early on from my first year law students about the different learning approaches that I used in class. The students overwhelmingly loved the hypothetical fact pattern scenarios that I prepared for them from time to time, and which we discussed in class. Many students asked for more. The students were less enthusiastic about the short case comment that a student had to present every week.

Inspired by this feedback, I changed the format of the student presentations for the winter term (which was destined to change anyway). Under the new format, students would have to create hypothetical fact pattern scenarios and moderate a class discussion about possible approaches to resolve the legal issues involved. The goal of that change was to ensure a regular flow of hypothetical fact pattern scenarios for my enthusiastic first year students, and raise the bar of the presentation assignment of the second term. The new assignment would support some of the key learning objectives of the course and mimic what students would soon have to do own their own: apply their legal reasoning to solve real-life factual situations. 

As this term and academic year draw to a close, the thoughts of several Deans will turn to broader trends and lessons learned. I wanted to share one such development based on my experience at Osgoode Hall Law School. This year more than any other, it is becoming apparent that art in legal education is no fad but. Art no longer seems like an interesting distraction or peripheral gloss in legal education, but is becoming central to our mission and how we can best fulfill it.

The Association of Canadian Clinical Legal Education (ACCLE) is pleased to host its 6th Annual Conference at the College of Law, University of Saskatchewan from October 23-24, 2015. This year’s conference will focus on “The Place of Clinical Legal Education.” Submissions should be sent by email to Gemma Smyth at [email protected] with the subject line “ACCLE Conference 2015 Proposal” by April 30, 2015.

The call for papers is available here in English and in French.

A tour of the law library is a time-honoured feature of orientation for first-year law students. At some point during their first week at law school, perhaps even on their first day, in between signing up for multiple extra-curricular activities and eating burgers deftly cooked by faculty members, students are shown the law library. If they are lucky, law librarians will take small groups and show them the important features of the library: case law reporters, statutes, gazettes, Hansards, and other resources which are infinitely useful for the legal research they will shortly be doing.

It’s not clear, however, just how much the law students actually take in on such tours. The first few days (and arguably the first year) of law school are stressful. Concerns about tuition, about how much smarter all the other students seem, and the increasing stress over job prospects (see, for example, Noel Semple’s blog posting of December, 2014) can all work to make the law library tour a distant memory. This year at the University of Alberta, we decided to introduce a Library Scavenger Hunt to supplement the orientation library tour.

by Anita Anand and Vijay Jog

Examinations of board composition in public companies focus on the absence of women but rarely on the absence of visible minority directors (VMDs). In countries such as Canada, the United States and Australia, where visible minorities contribute significantly to GDP and represent a high growth segment of the population, a question arises as to whether boards should bear some demographic similarity to the society in which the firm operates. In order to understand board composition and its potential impact on a firm’s performance, more information is required about the complement of VMDs on boards of directors. We seek to fill this gap in the literature.

Dear Colleagues,

We have received significant feedback from CALT members on the need to respond to public reports that comment on or affect legal education in Canada. One of these reports is the Canadian Bar Association’s August 2014 “Futures: Transforming the Delivery of Legal Services in Canada” (“Futures Report“). CALT was approached to comment on the report earlier, but for various reasons was unable to do so. We are now in a position to begin consulting our membership and other interested parties on this and other reports. 

We chose the CBA Futures Report because of its comments on legal education, mostly contained in Part 7 between pages 53 and 65. 

CALT invites comments from all legal educators and CALT members. All comments should be sent to Gemma Smyth ([email protected]) on or before February 27, 2015. Comments can be wide ranging, but should relate directly to comments made in the Futures Report and those affecting Canadian legal education, widely defined. 

Upon receipt of comments, the CALT Executive will compile the responses into its own Report that reflects the views of its membership and other law teachers. The Report will be circulated for comments before being send to the Canadian Bar Association.  

Thank you,

CALT Executive

In 1979, SSHRC received only two applications for funding from legal scholars. Concerned about the state of an academic discipline that was apparently disinterested in research, and with the endorsement of the CALT and the Committee of Canadian Law Deans, SSHRC appointed the Consultative Group on Research and Education in Law to investigate. The CGREL report, Law and Learning (1983), advocated the intensification of scholarly activities in Canadian law faculties. More specifically, it sought to legitimize and reinforce trends towards socio-legal teaching and research that had been developing in Canadian universities since the 1960s.

CALT is pleased to announce that it is accepting nominations for its annual awards. The deadline for nominations is February 23, 2015.

“Will I find a job as a lawyer, and will it be the kind of job I really want?” Most law teachers have heard these or similar questions from their students. Anxiety about career prospects is neither surprising nor entirely new. However recent media reports and buzz within the profession have given tomorrow’s lawyers two additional things to worry about: offshoring and computerization.

Clinical and doctrinal approaches to teaching and learning have not always been happy companions in the pedagogical life of a law school. Often cast as a-critical or a-contextual skills training better left to articling, clinical learning is seen by some to lack the gravitas of doctrinal approaches. In 2013, I began a series of interviews with clinicians and clinical law students across Ontario that very clearly showed the gap between doctrinal and clinical learning. When asked what knowledge and skill law students brought to the clinic, the most common response from both law students and clinicians was “none”. While this response might point to difficulties with knowledge transfer rather than the actual content of law school courses, these answers were – for me – startling. Clinicians also noted the difficulty in educating students on introductory skills (understanding retainers and interviewing clients, how to detect a conflict of interest, speaking to a motion). Many were eager to delve into critical lawyering and radicalized approaches to teaching and learning, particularly about ethics and professionalism, poverty, and social justice approaches to practice. However, the skills and knowledge barrier made such approaches more challenging.

Dear Colleagues,

It is my great pleasure to be writing to you in my capacity as the new CALT president, elected at the June AGM in Winnipeg. Gemma Smyth, from the Windsor Law Faculty, was elected as the Vice-President. Derek McKee agreed to stay on as our Secretary-Treasurer for yet another year. Thanks to the efforts of past president Shauna Van Praagh, we have a large Executive this year representing almost every province. The Executive has four main committees: a website committee, membership committee, policy committee and annual conference committee. As usual, we also have graduate student representatives on the executive.

While there is much discussion about anti-bullying in schools, I think the focus needs to go beyond how to combat the menace of bullying and move to the next stage. My idea is to not just alleviate bullying and make the classroom a neutral setting but to create a pro-friendly classroom, one in which the focus is not just on being civil but being friendly. Also, I am very interested in exploring how to make classrooms a ‘safe space’ for the exchange of ideas and tolerance but also ‘friendly spaces’ in that creating a warm, happy environment for students might help to foster learning. This may be a tall order at a law school but I have hope. The idea that I am working on is something akin to anti-bullying but more along the lines of ‘pro-friendly’.