The impact of deliberate practice teaching methods on skill acquisition in a law school interviewing and counseling course

For decades American law schools graduated students who were proficient in the thinking aspects of law but had little training in certain fundamental skills that are essential when actually practicing law---skills like organization, problem-solving, communication, and counseling. In 1989, the influential ABA MacCrate Report identified the most important of these practical skills and challenged law schools and the legal profession to provide training for each.; One popular skills training approach is deliberate practice, a term coined by researchers studying the acquisition of expertise in performance and competitive domains.1 The deliberate practice method centers on learners performing a well-defined task, receiving informative feedback, and then repeating the task to correct errors. The success of deliberate practice is well documented in areas like athletics, but there is little literature or data to substantiate it as a best practice for teaching or acquiring law-related skills.; This study analyzes two different deliberate practice instructional methods used in four interviewing and counseling classes taught at Brigham Young University Law School between 2003 and 2006. The skill being studied is framing; which is a communication technique used by lawyers to guide clients through an interview or counseling session in a thorough, orderly, and systematic manner. Students in all classes completed seven practice exercises with embedded framing tasks. Two classes were video-recorded during their exercises, engaged in self-evaluation while watching videos of their exercises, and received teacher feedback on both their practice exercises and the self-evaluations of their practice. These two classes constituted the Video Treatment Group. The other two classes were not video-recorded during their practice exercises, did exercise self-evaluations from memory, and received only peer feedback on their exercises. These two classes constituted the Memory Treatment Group. Students in all classes did a video-recorded Baseline Consultation before course instruction began and a video-recorded Capstone Consultation following the seven exercises.; The findings of this study suggest that both the video and memory deliberate practice instructional methods are effective ways of teaching framing skills. However, students who utilize deliberate practice techniques that incorporate video-assisted self evaluation and teacher feedback demonstrate a greater increase in the number and variety of framing skills they use than do students who engage in deliberate practice with memory-based self-evaluation only.; 1Ericsson (1996).