In Civil Procedure, with enrollments from 90 to 120 students, active participation occurs through small, student facilitated learning groups that supplement the larger classroom. Students are given problems, role-plays and simulations that involve them in active learning. They also have the opportunity to ask questions, to learn from each other and to interact in a casual, open-ended, and participatory environment.

See resource page for examples of problems and role plays.

 

These sections are made possible by the availability of teaching fellows, who facilitate the 15 person sections. These teaching fellows are highly successful second or third year students from prior civil procedure classes who showed exceptional understanding of the material, motivation, communication and leadership skills. They get 3 course credits for their work.

 

The teaching fellows help faculty develop problems, simulations, and lesson plans for each weekly small group session. Faculty and teaching fellows meet every two weeks to share ideas about the class and plan upcoming sessions. Teaching assistants also provide oral and written feedback, based on an answer guide prepared by the professor, to students on ungraded, written assignments, including drafting a complaint and answer, negotiating and drafting a pre-trial order, and drafting a personal jurisdiction memo. The sections meet in a small classroom or a lounge once a week. Students do not get additional credit for these sessions.

 

The larger class sessions anchor the more abstract concepts to a familiar, practice context. A factual scenario involving a claim of sexual harassment provides the organizing thread for exercises, which students conduct within the small person section. The extra sessions are optional except for assigned role plays in mediation, a summary judgment argument, the preparation of a discovery plan and the conduct of a pre-trial conference.

In Employment Discrimination, Sturm uses interdisciplinary readings, role plays, and case studies to expand students’ exploration beyond the courtroom and to introduce psychological, organizational, and transactional dimensions of lawyers’ responses to workplace bias.

With enrollments from 40 to 90 students, Sturm has weekly panels of five or six students who are responsible for facilitating the class. She meets with them in advance. If the subject matter of the upcoming class is technical, such as statistics or burden shifting, she uses these students as a focus group to determine how best to run the class.

If the subject matter lends itself to normative questions or discussion, then these students participate in planning the class. Another less time-consuming strategy is to assign a panel of students to email the professor individually a comment about the readings and a question they would like to explore in class. For issues such as affirmative action that often spark stylized or polarized discussion, she either uses small group discussion or a role-play within the large class itself.

See resource page for examples of problems and role plays.