Reflections on Extra Life

Failing in first semester is an unfortunate, but necessary experience for some law students. It can be difficult to find an appropriate response as an educator, particularly where a student tries hard but fails by a narrow margin. Repeating a unit can put a student behind, especially where there is no summer school option and a student's subjects get out of sync with their peers. Supplementary assessment just seems to set students up to fail at the same task that we already know they have a problem with. Disturbingly, there seems to be an increasing trend toward blaming the teaching in these situations. 'Extra Life' was an idea we cooked up to develop a different path which integrates students back into the learning community.

Under this program, students who narrowly failed a foundation unit have the opportunity to attend a weekend intensive where problem based learning activities allow them to see the material from a different point of view and think about their own learning styles and preferences. HERE is the report I wrote on the pilot program which ran in 2008 (although you might want to download it, viewing it through google docs loses its formatting).

We ran the pilot on contract law, traditionally the most difficult subject in the first year law curriculum. While other units focus on skills and transition, our contract law is the first real introduction to common law method, hard core legal reasoning and reading cases (plus the time management issues all this involves). Since the students already had the theory, or most of it, we focussed on the practical application of principles to everyday issues – phone contracts, internet scams, etc.

A couple of years on, some of the students in the pilot have inevitably dropped out. However most are still with us and a couple have become strong students (one has a human rights scholarship now). While we have grown accustomed to supplementary assessment, re-assesment, student complaints and other processes they are far from cost-neutral. Rather than commit resources to further entrenching the 'us vs them' approach, it does seem more productive to focus on approaches that are collaborative, reintegrative and focus on a student's responsibility for their own learning. I would love to hear from anyone who runs similar programs.