For the past few years, I have co-taught a pre-bar course for students in their final semester. The course covers some heavily tested doctrine, as well as the academic and test-taking skills needed to succeed on the essay, multiple-choice, and performance components of the bar exam.  In order to deliver the doctrinal material, we gave lectures based off of outlines from a commercial bar review course. While we tried to mirror the traditional bar review lecture style of following the outline closely, we did permit questions during the lectures. Additionally, we interspersed practice questions throughout the lectures, and gave many examples. The result, (I like to think), was that students walked out of class with a fairly good understanding of the rules. The downside, of course, was that we didn’t accurately reflect the actual experience of commercial bar review lectures, which are not interactive, even when students choose to attend live lectures. Additionally, while we tried to do MBEs and/or essays in every class, we often spent so much time on the doctrine that we were unable to do as much in-class practice as we would have liked to do. ​

In the past twenty years, law school academic support programs (ASP) have transformed from relatively new phenomena to a standard department in law schools across the country. Traditionally, these departments existed to assist students who faced cultural or economic disadvantages, academic difficulty, and those needing accommodations. In recent years, with respect to the wave of technology, ASP departments face an entirely new set of students, with a new set of challenges. Recent students have spent their developmental years immersed in technology, resulting in new thinking patterns and different ways of processing information. As a result, traditional teaching methods are no longer as effective as they once were. ​

My work in ASP began nearly three years ago; I am still a baby fish in the ASP sea. 
This article discusses some of my experiences as a new fish in the big ASP ocean, three lessons I’ve learned about navigating the murky waters so far, and some of the challenges along the way.   
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For those of you with young children, you may recognize this title from the popular kid’s show Wonder Pets where, before embarking on an adventure to rescue a pet in trouble, the team chants the familiar song (“What’s gonna work? Teamwork!”) over and over.  But teamwork isn’t limited to Wonder Pets and Paw Patrol; it can be exceedingly effective in legal education as well.  My entire career in legal education has been spent teaching in the team-based programs of legal writing and academic support.  A regular refrain from colleagues around the country is that teams do not function well.  This is not a problem unique to a particular school or specific directors; rather, I think it demonstrates the reality that working on a team is not always easy.  But teamwork is always a worthwhile pursuit for our students, and ourselves as academics.  Successful academic support and writing programs are often those that, regardless of program model, function as a team.  This essay sets out some observations on how to work well in teams, based on more than twenty years of experience with team teaching. ​

In the late 1970s, Edward Packard created a unique literary experience that allowed the reader to sit in the driver’s seat of the story, making choices about the main character’s actions to shape the plot’s outcome.  These wildly popular books, known as Choose Your Own Adventure, are lauded for capturing young readers’ attention by harnessing their innate creativity.  This interactive genre has stood the test of time and even expanded, now appearing in grown-up titles such as My Lady’s Choosing, an interactive romance novel, and interactive YouTube videos that allow viewers to choose the course of action. ​

​The ubiquitous question on law school campuses today is: what does it take to help graduates succeed on the bar exam? The responses differ depending on who you ask, and many of those responses are more reflective of wishful thinking than long-term planning. Despite the wishes of many law school administrators there is no one-size-fits-all solution, and bar success cannot be accomplished in one semester and $500, or even two semesters and $5000. Bar success is built brick by brick, semester by semester, over the course of a law school career.