Emily Finch | Legal Education and the World Café

Me, legal education and the World Café

A bit of a story.

What a gift life has given me. I have a job that I love.

A job that combines talking about my favourite subject with helping students to understand, use, question and, hopefully, love the law.

WHERE IT BEGAN

The beginning

That is not a gift that I ever expected to receive. I didn’t set out to be a teacher. I had a PhD studentship that required me to teach and so I had to teach. I wasn’t looking forward to it and I didn’t know how to do it. But I did know that it was important to try to be good at it. My own memories made it very clear to me that what a teacher does matters a lot to students.

My first adventure in teaching (three back-to-back one-hour Criminal Law tutorials on a rainy Thursday afternoon) pre-dated the current system of preparation and support for PGRs. I had just one half-hour meeting to prepare me to teach from which I took two pieces of advice:

Think about tutorials that you have been in and what it was that was good and bad about them. Do the good bits and don’t do the bad bits.

Don’t worry if it doesn’t go well. Just do something different next time.

At the time, that didn’t make me feel at all equipped to teach first-year law students. I’d read every chapter in every Criminal Law textbook about the subject matter (murder and causation) but I had no idea what to do with it. Looking at myself in the mirror in the ladies’ toilet before the first tutorial, I promised myself that if it was excruciatingly bad then I would give the studentship back and pay my own fees.

Three hours later, I was back in front of that mirror, smiling the happiest smile. Somehow, without knowing what I was doing, I had done “the teaching thing” and it had felt wonderful. I said out loud: “I have to do this.”

That was the beginning of a career-long love affair with teaching. Looking back, I can see that those two apparently simple pieces of advice have shaped my teaching ever since. I now translate them into two principles:

Teaching should be designed from the learner’s perspective.

Teaching should be continually adapted in response to experience.

The principles may sound simple but they matter. The challenge is staying connected to the learner’s experience and knowing what changes might improve it.

That's where the World Café comes in.

I think of the World Café as a conversational way of finding and solving problems. It gives me a way to see today’s world of legal education from the point of view of a student. It shows me what is working and what isn’t and, crucially, allows students and me to explore how we might improve the bits that aren’t working.

I want to teach in a way that makes students feel powerful and brave as learners. I want to give them a spark of interest in the law that burns bright in their minds after class has finished. I want them to enjoy the work we do together. The World Café helps me to do these things.

I’ve learned so much about how to be a better teacher and a better supporter of students from the World Café sessions. This feels far too important to keep to myself so I created the Legal Education Café to share what I’ve learned, how it has changed my teaching and the difference it can make for students.