legal sanity

Last year, I wrote a post about reforming the typical law school curriculum. I stated: “As law students, we learn how to translate human relations into rules, rights and responsibilities – the three “rs” of legal education. As a result, we’re well-versed in transforming complex situations into a dry set of facts and applicable laws. But, we gain little to no insight into meeting the needs of the people behind the legal matters we take on. Law schools will go a long way towards fostering happier lawyers and a healthier profession if they recognize and teach the human relations skills that are so vital to optimal lawyering.”

In a recent post titled The Person Behind The Mask, David Maister similarly reflects on the importance of separating the humans from the roles they play out in our daily interactions. He observes that our success in business and life largely turns on our ability to “access the human beings behind the mask” in a way that elicits and engages their “true wishes, desires and concerns.”

Maister’s words and my own observations about this human-to-human skill set resonated loud and clear as I read a csmonitor.com article discussing why some professors are banning laptops from classrooms. The piece opens with the perspective of University of Michigan law professor Don Herzog, who shares his findings that at “any given moment in a law school class, literally 85 to 90 percent” of the students were online shopping or reading the news. As I took in Herzog’s and others’ laments about this problem of “continuous partial attention,” I wondered whether laptop use was really to blame for the students’ disengagement from the lesson of the day.

If the professors really engaged the people behind the students in front of them – if they took the time to create a curriculum that met their true wishes, desires and concerns as budding professionals and seasoned consumers of educational services – would the students still tune them out by tuning in to the laptops’ many offerings? I don’t think so. As I wrote in this post about the benefits of experience-based (or active) learning, students need to own the learning process. They need to become active participants by listening, responding and doing – all in a way that honors their needs and desires.

Once students are engaged with the course material and their professors in this interactive-participatory way, they’ll be able to benefit from the live connection talked about in this post from Kathy Sierra on Why face-to-face still matters!  The post explains why experts decree “live interaction with another human” “crucial to the brain” and superior to “any other form of communication.”