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.

Learning Module: Legal Knowledge and Reflective Learning

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This is a two part exercise that works best if there is a week between classes for students to reflect and think about their knowledge. I tend to combine this with other learning modules during each of the weeks, but you might find that students have enough meat to fill a class, especially if you return to them with 'new developments' in the scenario.

This task asks students to think about the way in which disciplinary knowledge effects your point of view (POV) on a social issue or dispute. The first part focusses on an interpersonal dispute, the second takes that dispute into the broader social context.

This is a fairly introductory task and it does allow for problem based learning – there is no specific correct answer and part of the fun involves seeing how the different disciplines contest each others knowledge, particularly how law insinuates itself as the top dog in the knowledge pack.

In the second part of this task we introduce reflective learning, give students a short guide to reflective learning and then ask them to reflect on their answers to the first part, using the second task as a means of returning to the original ideas, but from a different angle. Most students will find that if a week has elapsed between tasks, that their knowledge will have evolved, they will have discussed ideas with others and drawn connections between the task and other areas of study. If they have done these things and can describe what has happened, they are well on the way to becoming reflecitve learners.