We Want to See you Struggle: Celebrating Failure and Fostering Resilience in the Legal Research Classroom

New law students fear failure. In law school classrooms, they fear being called on and getting the wrong answer. In experiential legal research classrooms, they fear doing the wrong search or finding the wrong case or statute. Well-meaning (and often time-pressed) teachers and trainers often compound this fear by created well-managed, smooth-running “demos” in Westlaw and Lexis. These demos do a very good job of highlighting the sources, tools, and features essential to doing legal research, but they often obscure the struggle and failures inherent in legal research. Recent research by psychologists such as Carol Dweck and Angela Duckworth show how failure creates rich learning opportunities. Further, they find that the practice of failure strengthens resilience in learners – a skill that is critical for law students. Expanding on their research, Kaci Bishop outlines a “failure pedagogy” that maximizes learning in law students. By obscuring the failed searches and failed strategies behind legal research, teachers miss an opportunity for both deepening student legal research skills and fostering resilience. Drawing on the psychological research on failure and Bishop’s “failure pedagogy”, this session will help teachers bring failure into their classrooms and use it to deepen student learning and foster their resilience