Every student’s journey through law school begins with an intensive “1L” immersion experience. Students assigned to Clinical Professor of Law Carol Wallinger for Legal Analysis, Writing, and Research I and II hear from day one that they ultimately will need to serve as their own editors. So, she asks, shouldn’t they be immersed in that role from the start?
Wallinger has been implementing innovative teaching methods since she joined the Rutgers Law–Camden faculty in 2001. Her teaching philosophy draws on self-determination theory, which stresses the importance of autonomy, competence, and relatedness in graduate education. For instance, she put a cap on the red ink mark ups of student papers, and instead welcomes students into her office for live-critiquing feedback sessions. She’s also had success with effectively teaching brevity by incorporating a game show-inspired “Lightning Round” lesson in her writing classes. But at its core, Wallinger’s teaching approach is rooted in how she establishes meaningful relationships with her students.
“Research shows that students do better when they feel they have a relationship with the professor,” she says. “I don’t pretend to mark up every error, that’s a misnomer, that the professor just gives the student a list of corrections. It’s their job to edit their own papers. My job is to teach them how to be good editors.”
While her students have long appreciated Wallinger’s teaching – her office is dotted with thank you notes – this year her innovations have been officially recognized by Rutgers University–Camden as one of three 2014 recipients of the Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence.
According to Alison Nissen, a clinical associate professor at Rutgers Law–Camden, who nominated Wallinger for the annual award, “As clinical faculty, teaching is the primary criteria by which we are evaluated by the University, and Carol’s work demonstrates an ongoing commitment to teaching excellence and innovation.”
But Wallinger is hesitant to take any direct credit for her teaching successes, even declaring “everything a collaboration.” While she is very clear that the theory she champions at national and international conferences is not of her own invention, Wallinger hopes her experience at Rutgers Law–Camden may inspire its adoption at other professional schools. “Research has shown that teaching via a self-determination approach increases student engagement, as well as the adoption of professional values, and academic performance, including performance on the licensing exam. However, few professional schools have implemented this research,” says the legal educator.
Wallinger’s innovative teaching certainly has made a mark beyond the law school on the Rutgers–Camden campus. Her undergraduate degree is in nursing, and she holds a joint appointment as a clinical professor at both the law school and the nursing school at Rutgers–Camden, where she teaches “Legal Issues in Nursing” to nursing undergraduates. Her nursing training also informs her approach to teaching legal writing, most notably for how she teaches to the individual student.
“My nursing education taught me to treat everyone as an individual and I approach my law students that way,” she explains. “Each student enters law school with a personal approach to learning new material.”
While she might work to help students help themselves become better legal writers, she certainly acknowledges her great responsibility in guiding them through their first year in law school.
“We are on a journey together for a year. I’m both their tour operator and travel advisor,” she jests of the pivotal 1L year, where at the end students have gained a newfound legal vantage point.
Wallinger’s world of teaching is still evolving. She is one of a number of clinical professors researching how best to use a flipped classroom model to teach LAWR, which swaps the traditional lecture-style learning in class for videos beforehand. Future classes would focus on the homework and processing of complicated material with faculty supervision. Essentially she’d like to create a series of how-to videos about legal analysis, editing techniques, and even how to brief a case that students could watch until the concept is learned.
“This approach has been accomplished famously in math and science, where there are right and wrong answers,” Wallinger adds. “I’d like to take this into my writing classes. It’s not impossible.”