The UNM School of Law Professor Aliza Organick has been named one of the first UNM Teaching Fellows by the UNM Center for Teaching Excellence. She is joined by Fellows from many disciplines and colleges, including the School of Engineering, School of Nursing, Law School, College of Education, Honors and Arts and Sciences.
Organick’s work and her selection as a UNM Teaching Fellow follows the lead of Law School Dean David Herring, who is on the forefront of the national movement to develop learning assessment models in law schools, and is encouraging the law faculty to create meaningful learning assessment tools.
Nationally, as law schools look more closely at alternatives to the traditional classroom pedagogy and the requirement of more lawyering skills courses, it is critical to develop tools to assess the quality of those courses and transfer of skills from the classroom to actual representation of clients in clinical programs and the practice of law. A general consensus is that clinical legal education, in which students are directly engaged in the practice of law, remains the gold standard for preparing students for practice. However, a gap remains between standard legal education and student preparedness for clinic.
The opportunity to work with experts and to collaborate with colleagues on main campus is a first step toward shared goals at the School of Law. Within the context of national and local goals, the focus of the Fellowship is to develop a skills based, pre-clinic course and assessment tools to measure whether the proposed course effectively teaches those skills in a manner that creates the pathways for high-level transfer of those skills into the clinic and law practice context.
For more information contact Tamara Williams at (505) 277-9504 or email williams@law.unm.edu