My Experience at AASE

AASE was a huge success again.  Seattle University did an amazing job hosting the event.  Isabel Freitas Peres and the team at Seattle provided great spaces to enjoy the presentations, and I definitely enjoyed the food variety throughout the week.  

The presenters did a great job last week.  I could tell they spent significant time preparing and provided great insights for everyone.  I wanted to pass along summaries of a few presentations I attended.  I encourage everyone to go to the AASE TWEN page and download the materials or contact presenters for their information.  Obviously, I couldn't make it to all the presentations.  Below are just a few of the ones I attended.  

Rory Bahadur's IRAC presentation was outstanding.  I love Rory's energy when he presents, and this presentation was very practical.  He provided 3 specific IRAC exercises to use in the classroom.  The time required for each exercise ranged from 10 to 40 minutes.  They are easy to use, already made for you, and require students to do the majority of the work in class.  I suggest contacting him or going to the TWEN page to find the 3 exercises.  

Scott Johns, Denise DeForest, and Christopher Engle-Newman's bar workshop lesson in a box provided a good foundation for any summer bar workshop.  Similar to Rory, I wish I could recreate Scott's energy in the classroom.  They did an excellent job of both simulating the workshop and explaining why they incorporated each component.  Their workshops include an introduction with a bar exam tip, retrieval practice from previous workshops, and a schema for the current subject.  The schema section for Con Law was great because Scott drew on the whiteboard while explaining very basic structure.  Workshops then move to MBE questions to teach strategy and the law.  They normally go through an essay prompt as well before finishing with takeaways from the workshop.  The setup used learning science in every step and was very well planned.

The initial plenary session with Dean Mike Barry, Zoe Niesel, and Isabel Peres was insightful.  Dean Barry explained statistics and modeling better than I had seen before, and he explained how to use the statistics.  The individual student information looks helpful when trying to counsel students during summer bar prep.  Zoe and Isabel discussed how to use the statistics when creating or modifying programming.  One big takeaway is none of us need to understand how to run the statistics.  We can partner with analysts on our main campus, bar review companies, or hire someone.  

Lastly, I encourage everyone to get information from Kris Franklin and Paula Manning.  They discussed preparing both students and professors for individual student meetings.  Part of the problem is everyone has different (and probably unreasonable) expectations walking into student meetings.  We can train both students and faculty how to utilize individual student meetings better, which then leads to more improvement in the long run.

There were many excellent presentations at AASE.  I did not see all of them, so I encourage everyone to look through the program and contact presenters for information or materials.  I can't wait for next year in D.C.

(Steven Foster)