What’s New in the Classroom: Holistic Assessment

The current issue of the Journal of the Association of Legal Writing Directors (JALWD) has a number of interesting articles. In this post I want to discuss one particular article that really made me think about how I assess my students’ legal writing: Roger Klurfeld and Steven Placek’s article, “Rhetorical Judgments: Using Holistic Assessment to Improve the Quality of Administrative Decisions.”

In this piece, Klurfeld and Placek describe their work to help improve the quality of written decisions issued by the National Appeals Division of the United States Department of Agriculture. Their observations and experience make me wonder whether a holistic, reliability-tested approach to assessing student writing would improve the students’ learning experience and the overall quality of their writing.

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Responding to the Foreclosure Crisis in Milwaukee

Everyone by now knows of the terrible consequences we face stemming from the foreclosure debacle. As part of the $700 billion bailout plan passed by Congress this fall, certain monies were allocated for cities and states to address some of the problems with the foreclosure crisis: increased crime in neighborhoods with a concentration of foreclosed (and oftentimes abandoned/vacant) properties; a depressed housing market with rapidly declining housing values; and a declining property tax base as a result of the declining home values and reduction in home ownership.

In order to make recommendations to the City of Milwaukee regarding these problems and on how to spend the $9.2 million allocated to the City in the bailout plan, Mayor Barrett established the Milwaukee Foreclosure Public Initiative (MFPI), a public-private partnership. Our own Assistant Dean for Public Service Dan Idzikowski was one of the leaders of the MFPI, serving as a workgroup chair (which oversaw three committees related to the MFPI’s work). In fact, the Mayor specifically recognized and thanked Dan in his press release on the final work product of the MFPI.

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What’s New in the Classroom: On the Issues

This semester I taught a terrific group of students in my Legislation class. We had engaging and thought-provoking discussions about the legislative process and statutory interpretation. Indeed, some of those discussions continue on this Blog with some of my students participating in the on-line discussion about judicial activism.

As part of the class, I required my students to attend a number of the “On the Issues” programs hosted by our Distinguished Fellow in Public Policy and Law, Mike Gousha (see http://law.marquette.edu/cgi-bin/site.pl?on-the-issues/index for a list of the sessions from this semester along with corresponding podcasts). My reasoning for doing so, as I explained to my students, was to help them connect the material we learned about and discussed in class to real-world examples that impact us in Milwaukee, in Wisconsin, and nationally. And after each “On the Issues,” we had fruitful discussions about what the guest speakers said and how that related to the topics we grappled with in class.

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