Critiquing Law Students-Various Approaches

In the last couple of days, I've gotten two sets of advocacy teaching evaluations, one from the NITA Public Service Attorney course and the other from my summer trial advocacy course. As always when I get evaluations, I look for trends and ways to improve my course and my approach to students the next time around.

The most interesting trend to me with my summer course at the law school was that students suggested I should not worry about their feelings and be more direct with some of my critiques. On reflection, I think I've fallen back into the habit of finding something to praise along with something to critique. The students said they would prefer to know what they should fix and improve, not what they were already doing well. They also said they'd like more critiques.

Their critiques fall squarely in line with what NITA and other organizations teach about critiquing. Find things to fix and help the students improve for the next time.

It's good feedback and good food for thought. As an aside, I've found over the last couple of years in both my doctrinal and skills classes, that as I give feedback and critique to students, the result seems to be that they want more of it. In my 1L criminal law class last year, I gave a couple of out-of-class writing assignments detailed feedback. On the course evaluations, the students said they wanted more writing assignments with more feedback--a trend that surprised me a great deal

Is there a right way to critique the advocacy performances of law students, or, for that matter, practicing law professionals? The four-step NITA model (Headnote-Playback-Prescription-Rationale) has been in place for over thirty years and has proved workable, durable and efficient in a variety of settings.

In recent years, there has been increased discussion among advocacy teachers of different ways to critique. Charlie Rose has introduced the "What-Why-How" method. Mark Caldwell at NITA now includes opportunities for re-performance as part of the NITA model. I have written about the transformational advocacy critique, a variation on the the techniques used by Joshua Karton of Communication Arts for the Professional. In practice, both at NITA courses and law schools, instructors use an astonishing and creative variety of approaches to critiquing students.

Although there are many ways to critique, there are some principles of critiquing that seem universal: (1) respect the student; (2) don't waste time praising the student, but rather find things the student can fix; (3) don't overload the student--fix one, or at most two, things at a time; (4) resist the urge to tell war stories; (5) manage time to maximize performance opportunities. I'm sure there are others I have missed.