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Can law schools learn from medical schools about teaching methods?

Paul Caron at TaxProf Blog has linked to two articles considering that question. Here is the abstract from "See One, Do One, Teach One:  Dissecting Medical Education's Signature Pedagogy in the Law School Classroom" (Georgia State University Law Review):

With the recent publication of the Best Practices in Legal Education,(1) and the Carnegie Report on the Advancement of Teaching,(2) law professors today have an opportunity to adopt pedagogies that have been successfully used in other professional disciplines that, like law, integrate skills and theory. In this article, we focus specifically on the “see one, do one, teach one” approach used in medical education because medical students and law students develop early professional reasoning skills in parallel ways.(3)

This article dissects medical education’s signature pedagogy by focusing on the use of simulation and samples, active learning exercises, and peer teaching opportunities as a corollary to using visualization, application, and demonstration in the medical context. The article guides legal educators through the process of implementing the methodology. This article concludes that utilizing the “see one, do one, teach one” methodology facilitates student engagement

Use Walk n' Play on your cell or iPod to see how much you move—Competitive? You can measure your movement against that of people from around the world

Want to pay more attention to how much exercise you get? Even measure your simple daily activities? And have fun? Try this free program.

Excerpt from "A New Device Helps Monitor Low-Level Physical Activity With a Cell Phone" (Newswise.com):

About two thirds of the American population is overweight or obese, putting them at higher risk for health problems such as heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes. The obesity epidemic in America is the result of poor eating habits, genetics, and a lack of exercise. It’s therefore difficult for public health officials to get people to make a conscious effort to control their weight.

The Cell Phone Device That Helps You Exercise

This is why Chinmay Manohar in the Department Endocrinology, Nutrition and Diabetes of the Mayo Clinic is designing a device to help motivate people to be more active. His team has developed a program that helps people monitor their normal day-to-day physical activity using an everyday device like a cell phone or mp3 player.

...

The current version is fairly basic, according to Manohar. The user inputs their height and weight into the program and throughout the day, their score can be monitored. The program will tell the user if they are winning or losing against

Radio show tomorrow AM on rewiring your brain

Join David Solie and me tomorrow (May 1, 2010) at 9 AM Pacific, 10 Mountain, 11 Central and noon Eastern. The description of the program from the Web site:

Call-in Number: (347) 989-0140

We are swimming in an ocean of distractions which add layers of additional stress to the challenges of aging and caregiving. What can make this better? My guest, Stephanie West Allen, is an attorney, educator, conflict mediator, and devotee of neuroscience and believes she has an effective answer: Brains on Purpose™. Ms. Allen is the creator of Brains on Purpose™ programs where she shows people how to use their mind to change their brain in order to break and create new habits, increase focus and awareness, and achieve goals. In addition, she has developed a ground-breaking mediation model that utilizes the latest findings in neuroscience to facilitate resolution of conflict. She is going to discuss the science behind her program, how it works, and how listeners can use her approach to essentially "rewire" their brains. This is cutting edge thinking that is a must listen for second half of life (i.e. 50 and older) listeners.

Men who stare at nothingness: More about developing mental armor in the military

Dr. Amish Jha (whom I heard speak last month) recently co-designed a program in which soldiers were trained in mindfulness. (See past post about her training: Attention lawyers: A method for strengthening and sharpening your warrior mind.) She was recently interviewed by GQ about this program which helped the soldiers develop mental armor. From "The Men Who Stare At Nothingness":

In 2009, the U.S. Department of Defense gave $2 million to Dr. Amishi Jha and her team of neuroscientists at the University of Pennsylvania to see if meditation can help soldiers stay sane and focused in warzones. Their latest published research is promising, signifying the kind of breakthrough that could transform the way American servicemen perform, react, and live through war. And given that all data everywhere conceivable shows that war veterans suffer from PTSD and suicidal depression at inexcusable rates, this research, Dr. Jha and the U.S. military hope, could potentially abate those terrible statistics. GQ recently spoke with Dr. Jha to parse out the science of breathing deeply, and the implications of an ultimately chill-er military.

GQ: Why meditation?

Dr. Amishi Jha: The motivation from my side was to find out what preparing to go to war does to a soldier's mental state, which we measure as their attention and working memory. Because during that critical training period, the goal is to best ready them for what they're going to be doing next—to optimize their mental and physical readiness to do the task at hand.

So my first inquiry was to see if the current training method actually helped their mental capacity—if it helped keep them stable over time, and if it improved their working memory—but what we found was that working memory was actually degrading over time.

GQ: Why "working memory" as a metric? Why not stress level or ability to duck?

Click to read the rest.

Image credit: GQ.

HBR: Six-week blog series on the future of leadership

For six weeks, a Harvard Business Review blog is "imagining the future of leadership." The posts so far include:

• Leadership on the Brain by David Rock
• A Call for Mindful Leadership by Ellen Langer
• It's Not All About You by Deborah Ancona and Elaine Backman

Does playing hold value for lawyers?

The benefits of play for lawyers was the topic of my presentation in Orlando on March 26, at the Florida Bar's Solo & Small Firm Annual Conference. (Notes from the presentation.) I received many comments afterwords from attendees about how the session resulted in their reevaluating how they spend their time. Susan Cartiel Liebel (who gave an excellent keynote at the conference) said that two lawyers told her, "Stephanie gave me permission to play."

Partly because of my Florida program and also as a result of writing this blog post, I have been thinking much about play. I also have been watching people through a play lens. Do people play? How? When? Why? And most of all: What keeps people from playing?

During my session, I asked lawyers to describe the downsides of play. They were quite complete and honest in listing many of the reasons people, particularly lawyers, stay away from play. The reasons given ranged from "waste of time" to "I might like it too much and not work."

Then we looked at the benefits of play, some of which are:

• Facilitates creativity and innovation
• Helps you discover what you really value
• Reduces stress
• Promotes curiosity
• Creates new, fresh synapses

In short, it opens life up. Horizons get larger. Possibilities and options increase.

To hear more of the benefits of play, listen to this interview of Dr. Stuart Brown titled "Play, Spirit, and Character" (Speaking of Faith). He believes play "promotes trust, empathy and adaptability to

Knowing all the physical benefits of laughing, why would you maintain a perpetual, persistent straight face?

Because I believe in the many benefits of play and laughter, I have both posted here about them and given presentations around the country about their value. (Many of the programs have been given to lawyers, who typically are quick to see the serious benefits of lightening up.) And once I began learning a few years ago about the brain, I was even more convinced of play's and laughter's advantages.

With a big smile, I read an article published yesterday in Medical News Today titled "Repetitive Laughter Response Is Similar To The Effect Of Repetitive Exercise." In the article, the research of Doctors Lee Berk and Stanley Tan is described. (This pair have been doing laughter research for quite a while now; I have referred to them in articles I have written over the years on laughter.) The writer explains that Berk and Tan have developed a program for incorporating mirthful laughter into your life called Laughercise© (not to be confused with Laughercize).

From the article:

Dr. Lee S. Berk, a preventive care specialist and psychoneuroimmunology researcher at Loma Linda University's Schools of Allied Health (SAHP) and Medicine, and director of the molecular research lab at SAHP, Loma Linda, CA, and Dr. Stanley Tan have picked up where [Norman] Cousins left off. Since the 1980s, they have been studying the human body's response to mirthful laughter and

Blog Glob: "Pentagon: Boost Training With Computer-Troop Mind Meld"

Excerpt:

The Pentagon is looking to better train its troops - by scanning their minds as they play video games.

Adaptive, mind-reading computer systems have been a work-in-progress among military agencies for at least a decade. In 2000, far-out research agency Darpa launched “Augmented Cognition,” a program that sought to develop computers that used EEG scans to adjust how they displayed information — visually, orally, or otherwise — to avoid overtaxing one realm of a troop’s cognition. The Air Force also took up the idea, by trying to use EEGs to “assess the operator’s actual cognitive state”  and “avoid cognitive bottlenecks before they occur.”

Zeroing in on brain power is a strategy that reflects the changing tactics of war-fighting: today’s troop needs to be as cognitively ready as they are physically — if not more. They’ve also got to spend more time on the ground in urban settings, interacting with locals and canvassing for information. That’s where virtual cultural trainers often come in handy. Troops are prepped in language, social norms and cultural sensitivity, before they even leave their base.

The trainers are quickly becoming more sophisticated. ...

Click to read the rest of "Pentagon: Boost Training With Computer-Troop Mind Meld" (Wired).

The most excellent thoughts on leadership I have read -- maybe ever

Have you read something and wished everyone you knew would read it, too? That is how I responded today when I read this lecture given last year by William Deresiewicz to the plebe class at the United States Military Academy. I urge you to read "Solitude and Leadership" (The American Scholar).

I am not going to try to choose some excerpts from the lecture's main thread on leadership; it is all very good so I could not make choices. I will post a couple on peripheral topics, a couple that made me pause and think. First, on mediocrity:

That’s really the great mystery about bureaucracies. Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things—the leaders—are the mediocrities? Because excellence isn’t usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. Pleasing your teachers, pleasing your superiors, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until it’s time to stab him in the back. Jumping through hoops. Getting along by going along. Being whatever other people want you to be, so that it finally comes to seem that, like the manager of the Central Station, you have nothing inside you at all. Not taking stupid risks like trying to change how things are done or question why they’re done. Just keeping the routine going.

Then on concentration, thinking for yourself, and Twitter:

Now that’s the third time I’ve used that word, concentrating. Concentrating, focusing. You can just as easily consider this lecture to be about concentration as about solitude. Think about what the word means. It means gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input. It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube—and just

Your beliefs about moral character may influence how readily you forgive

Trust recovery is an odd but apt phrase. How quickly does someone trust another when they think that other has violated their trust in some way? Or does the one who believes she was violated ever trust again? Trust and forgiveness are often important ingredients in conflict resolution. For some possible clues as to what drives those two behaviors or feelings, take a look at this research published in Psychological Science.

From "How Implicit Beliefs Influence Trust Recovery" [pdf]:

Abstract:

After a trust violation, some people are quick to forgive, whereas others never trust again. In this report, we identify a key characteristic that moderates trust recovery: implicit beliefs of moral character. Individuals who believe that moral character can change over time (incremental beliefs) are more likely to trust their counterpart following an apology and trustworthy behavior than are individuals who believe that moral character cannot change (entity beliefs). We demonstrate that a simple but powerful message can induce either entity or incremental beliefs about moral character.

Discussion:

Trust recovery is an important, yet understudied process. Prior work has found that individuals can react to the same transgressions very differently. Though some individuals are very slow to forgive, others are very quick to forgive. We have identified a key characteristic that influences the effectiveness of trust-recovery efforts: implicit beliefs regarding moral character. In our experiment, individuals with incremental beliefs were significantly more likely to trust their counterpart following an apology and trustworthy behavior than were individuals with entity beliefs.

Theoretically, these results add to researchers’ understanding of the trust-recovery process and highlight the importance of the target’s