Graeme Blank is an Australian barrister and a lecturer at the Australian National University College of Law. This is his first contribution to the blog, and we hope there are many more to come.
Three
o’clock on a drowsy afternoon. The quiet
halls of legal power are broken by the crack of the gavel as the judge calls
the case to order. The plaintiff’s
application for an urgent injunction is supported by an extensive affidavit
setting out its concerns. The defendant
has reacted quickly and has an affidavit and outline of argument.
An
experienced practitioner conducting this hearing knows what is important. Yes, the legal case is significant. Facts do matter. But equally essential is how to engage a
judge who thought she had finished for the day and has other commitments on her
mind. We know about this issue because we have experience. Our personal construct of this situation
dictates it.
Our
students do not have that construct.
They have no experience.
We
obtain our views of the world from a number of sources. Jean Piaget suggests we organise our
knowledge into mental structures or schemata. A schema affects what we notice and how we
interpret and act. Importantly schemata
only change with experience; being told it is wrong does little.
George
Kelly developed a ‘personal construct theory’ in the 1950s which is now applied
in many industries to assist people better understand how their view of the
world may not be the only one. These
constructs provide our interpretation of events and experiences and help us
predict and control behaviour. They are concrete
and polar so need ‘opposites’: ‘healthy’ vs ‘sick’, ‘great teacher’ vs ‘poor
teacher’. Within those constructs are
elements set at the poles. For a teacher
two might be ‘good structure’ vs ‘no cohesion’, ‘interest in student’ vs ‘focus
on self’.
Kelly
postulates 11 corollaries. They include
that we construct participation based on the past, with the unexpected comes
change and that we can choose to gain new experience (‘expand our constructs’)
or stay in the safe zone.
So
what does this mean for advocacy coaches?
We ask students to perform new tasks in unfamiliar environments. A student’s only perception of a lawyer may
be cousin Vinny Gambini or an aggressive defence counsel on a favourite TV
show. Thus when we tell our students not
to act a certain way, their schema of a lawyer is challenged. They may struggle to accept the new
information and must learn the change, not be told.
This
struggle causes anxiety and fear. That
manifests in different ways. We must not
assume that trembling hands or clicking pens is fear of public speaking. Giving a solution to mask the trembling will
not help. The underlying cause remains.
Those
of us who prefer our ‘comfort zone’ are not ‘difficult’ but take more time to
process, accept and change. Unfortunately
we often typecast early. They may just
need more time. We need to better understand
before we apply our own schema of ‘problem student’ to them.
How
might we do that? Kelly developed a
‘repertory grid’ that could be given to each student to fill out. I do a drill early to introduce each student
by getting each other one in a ‘conga line’ using open questions. We get to
know the student. I get to see the types
of question asked by the students and from that I start to understand their
capacity to reflect and cope with new tasks without them being ‘on the spot’. Another option is to role play an event and
put each student into different roles (“Improvisation”) and see how well they
step into another’s shoes.
An
interesting by-product? I have a better
sense of my own constructs as well.
--Graeme Blank
No comments:
Post a Comment