My monthly post is up over at Positive Psychology News Daily.
Ernie the Attorney is getting into the CLE business with a program entitled "Paperless Lawyering." Apparently, he hasn't found the "traditional" CLEs he has attended very engaging as he says this about his program:
This will not be a traditional CLE seminar, although it will give you 3 hours of credit, including an hour for Ethics and an hour for Professionalism. We will give you useful information, presented in an engaging way.
Actually, the surveys we've done, both in Tennessee and in other states, suggest that very-high percentages of attorneys find CLE programs well-presented and useful and think mandatory requirements should be maintained. In a 1991 survey in TN, TX, GA, MN, and WA, attorneys responded affirmatively to a question on whether the courses they had been to in the last year were well presented at rates ranging from 80 - 96%. The Tennessee Commission on CLE & Specialization repeated that survey in 1999 and got a 96% affirmative response and again in 2006 and got 98%. Attorneys consistently state that Mandatory CLE programs improve their competence (79-91%) and that the requirements should be continued (77-86%). (MCLE program analysis here.) Further, when Tennessee evaluated every speaker at every CLE program in Tennessee for three years in the mid-90's, our consultant advised they were rated higher than many programs run by large organizations with paid presenters, training, and quality control efforts. Not bad. Not bad at all.
In Tennessee, we're continuing to work on quality. For one thing, we ran our second annual invitation-only speaker training program in August. These programs are for attorneys who speak frequently at CLE programs and who are recommended by our major CLE providers. We find busy attorneys taking 2 1/2 days out to attend the program and giving it hugely positive reviews. This speaks to the commitment of many CLE speakers.
Further, we're looking into ways to increase the impact of CLE on competence. For example, attorneys report that lack of commitment, energy, and engagement is a key cause of poor lawyering when it occurs. This is, of course, a key area of the programs I present, so I recently surveyed participants at those programs and found that over half (62.3%) had taken action as a result of those programs and that those who had acted were far more likely than those who had not to report improved general well-being and increased commitment, energy, and engagement with their practices. Now we need to find ways to help more CLE programs address these areas.
MCLE is no panacea, and it really works to improve overall competence not to address the deficiencies of the real "problem" attorneys. The old saying is, "You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink." True, but if you take the whole herd, most will.
In an article in Washington Monthly entitled Transformation 101, Kevin Carey makes a case that colleges are simultaneously driving down the cost of teaching through computer-facilitated instruction and increasing tuition. I'm not focusing on the "universities are wasting money", but in the middle of the story is a great description of one particular computer facilitated course -- the Math Emporium at Virginia Tech. Located in space leased from a bankrupt department store chain for $3 per square foot and using "modules" developed by the university and available either through the Internet or on computers in the Math Emporium, this program is proving very successful. Upperclass math majors, graduate students, and professors provide a human component, but much of the learning is done through these self-paced modules. Here's a key paragraph:
"Once the module materials are completed, students can take randomly generated practice tests that draw on a central bank of thousands of potential questions. If they get questions wrong, the computer refers them back to the appropriate materials, and there’s no limit to the number of practice tests they can take. When they decide they’re ready, students come to the Emporium to take an official, proctored test that’s generated in exactly the same way as the practice quizzes. Then they move to the next module. Instead of marking progress by time—the number of hours spent in proximity to a lecturer—Emporium courses measure advancement by evidence of learning.
The article goes on to describe how the University of Alabama doubled pass rates and eliminated a large white/black disparity in freshman math through a version of the approach exemplified by VT's Math Emporium.
Schools sell work to students. Getting students to buy more work, and higher quality work that better helps them acquire necessary knowledge and master relevant skills is what improvement is about. Technology can help. Let's use it.
Finding a nonlaw job is even more difficult for lawyers who have practiced law, Seckler told the NLJ. "The longer you've been practicing, the harder it is for people to picture you in some other role," he said. And legal training could be a negative in business because it teaches caution rather than risk-taking.
“If you want to be successful, you have to think more like an optimist," he told the legal newspaper. "There is a change in thinking that has to go on.”
Winston Churchill said, "I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else."
The idea that lawyers are pessimists, or that pessimism, either expectational or explanatory, is beneficial in the practice of law has been widely suggested, but I have not run across reliable evidence that this is so. If in fact, lawyers are pessimists, and even more importantly if good lawyers tend to be more pessimistic than average (in either sense of "pessimsim"), then the question will be whether it is the pessimism that causes the success or some quality associated with pessimism.
For example, pessimists may expereince more neutral or negative moods as opposed to the somewhat happy state most people experience most of the time. Since a neutral or negative mood facilitates close attention to detail, problem-spotting, etc., then the neutral or negative mood while engaged in lawyering tasks might be beneficial. Negative emotions could motivate successful lawyering behavior in zero sum conflicts, and emotional numbness would assist lawyers engaged in "Necessary Evils." If habitual, however, these emotional states would account for the high levels of depression, anxiety, alcoholism, and relationship problems suffered by lawyers. Then the question would be whether lawyers could learn to manage emotional states without adopting an overall pessimistic stance toward the world, and if in doing so they would be better able to assist clients.
Judith Warner in today's NYTimes writes about politics, but in the midst includes these two paragraphs:
This aversion to joyful anticipation is a feeling I know very well, and not just in relation to politics. Anticipating the worst – from birthdays, other holidays, vacations – is kind of my modus vivendi.
It is a habit of mind so natural and ingrained – and seemingly self-protective – that I’ve never thought to change it. Until this week, when a friend pointed out that, if one were to think like a realist instead of a knee-jerk pessimist, enjoying the moments in life when good things might be about to happen makes sense.
Ms. Warner's passage reminds me of the construct developed by Julie Norem: "defensive pessimism" -- lowering expectations in risky situations and doing lots of planning to avoid the worst. It's a strategy for managing high levels of anxiety. I would echo Ms. Warner's phrase of "seemingly self-protective." The result may be more to protect one from success than from failure! My classmate Caroline Miller reports that it is regret over goals not pursued -- perhaps from anxiety -- that is the hardest hurdle for her coaching clients to clear.
Karen Reivch, Andrew Shatte, Jane Gillham and others however, have offered an alternative approach in their research based on Seligman's explanatory style. This approach involves flexible, realistic, pragmatic optimism with the capacity for putting anxieties in perspective. Their work is is popularly available in The Resilience Factor and The Optimistic Child. It's what I teach when I work with lawyers or educators. I've seen the results and the research on the resilience approach and highly recommend it if anxiety about the future is hampering your enjoyment of life or holding you back from setting and reaching personally meaningful goals.
My monthly post is up over at Positive Psychology News Daily.
Surfing around, I noticed some posts in the political realm using word clouds on candidate speeches. Made me wonder how my web sites might come out. First, I went to www.shearonforschools.com -- the website I set up when I was running for the school board in Nashville and then maintained while I was on the board and for a couple of years afterwards. I pulled all the text I had written (over 15,000 words), ran it through http://wordle.net, and got this:
I pulled all my book notes off that site (over 64,000 words) and got:
That seems about right to me. I thought, talked, and wrote more about students as a board member. I read and studied about how teachers and schools can change so they work better.
Finally, looking at this blog since the Fall of 2005 when I started the MAPP program, I get:
Interesting in that my sense is that my focus has turned more to lawyers, lawyering, and law schools over the last two years. I suspect, however, most of that work has produced products such as materials and powerpoints for CLE presentations, memos, etc. -- none of which would show up here. On the other hand, I do still do a good bit of work in the K-12 education world, including working with Superintendents' Study Councils through the Penn Graduate School of Education, the work with teachers from the UK in the summer of '07 and with Geelong Grammar School in Australia in January of this year. And the continuing work with my colleagues John Yeager and Sherri Fisher at Culver Academies.
