Collaborating with the Real World: Opportunities for Developing Skills and Values in Law Teaching

This article describes a broad range of teaching innovations and opportunities that classroom law professors can take advantage of in their own backyards. It presents examples of real-world engagement by faculty who help their students learn the skills, values, and attributes of good professional practice by supplementing what they already are teaching well with opportunities to learn the law in real-world contexts. Classroom professors do not need to become clinical professors or start teaching lawyering skills courses. Instead, they can collaborate with clinical professors, practicing lawyers, and other professionals outside their classrooms in settings that relate to their doctrinal fields. Such collaborations can effectively draw on others\u27 expertise and skills to extend and deepen their students\u27 learning and thereby better prepare them for real-world practice. * • Learning in context is the most effective way to engender long-lasting learning and genuine understanding. The collaborations discussed in this article offer real-world contexts that promote this deeper engagement in learning. In addition, they allow the integration of the three domains (or apprenticeships ) of professional competency and identity that the Carnegie Report advocated be integrated in legal education: (1) knowledge (including cognitive and analytical skills); (2) interactive behavioral skills (including problem-solving, client-oriented, and communication skills); and (3) professional values and ethics. These three domains reflect what competent lawyers should know and how they think, what they should be able to do, and how they should act as professionals. Real-world collaborations like those described in this article help to integrate the three Carnegie apprenticeships in one course, rather than keep them siloed in different courses