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School of Law

The Law School takes several steps to evaluate and improve teaching within the institution. For at least the last 7 or 8 years, there has been a teaching initiation session conducted every year or two for new faculty. At this session, which takes place just before or soon after the start of the fall semester, three senior faculty members (including the Dean) sit down with the junior faculty, as well as any other faculty members who care to attend, and offer their perspectives on what makes for successful law teaching. The session is informal and open-ended; question and answer is encouraged after each of the three senior faculty members make 10-15 minute presentations of their own. This teaching initiation session has been well-received.

Two years ago the Law School initiated its Teaching Partnerships program, which has continued to the present. Under this initiative, law faculty members are paired into partnerships; faculty are free to choose their own partners or to have the Teaching Initiatives Committee choose partners for them. Teaching partners then visit each other's classes on several occasions during the school year and exchange feedback. Faculty also are encouraged to videotape their classes, and review the film either with their partner or by themselves. The teaching partnerships program has been well-received, and most faculty members have participated at one point or another.

Faculty members are encouraged to distribute course evaluations at the end of each semester, and nearly everybody does. The course evaluation forms include questions calling for numerical evaluations of several aspects of the class and the teaching as well as more open-ended questions calling for written student comments. Students generally take the evaluations quite seriously, and many provide detailed comments. These student course evaluations are on file in the law library for student use in course selection, and the Law Weekly last semester started publishing a list of the most popular law school classes. Faculty members receive the course evaluations back for their perusal after they submit grades for the course.

Evaluation of teaching is an important part of the tenure review process. All three members of tenure subcommittees sit in on several of the tenure candidate's classes and report results back to the appointments committee, which then discusses and evaluates the candidate's teaching. The subcommittee also interviews large numbers of students from past and present classes for their input. The subcommittee also consults the candidate's recent course evaluations.

Within recent years, the Law School has undertaken an exciting new initiative in teaching through its "Principles and Practices" offerings. These courses offer students the opportunity, in small classroom settings, to integrate legal theory and practice through courses jointly taught by law faculty and visiting practitioners. These courses tend to be highly demanding, but they have also been extremely popular with the students. Moreover, with growth in the size of the faculty in recent years, the number of small seminar offerings has increased significantly, affording students more opportunities to enjoy closer contact with the faculty, often in conjunction with substantial writing projects. Also, the current Associate Dean for Faculty has pursued a policy of reducing the size of sections for required first-year courses. Thus, for example, rather than having three Constitutional Law classes each containing one-third of the first-year class (that is, about 125 students per section), the Law School currently offers six Constitutional Law sections (each containing only about sixty-two students).

Some of the Law School's most important teaching initiatives take place informally. Faculty members regularly discuss teaching styles, as well as the substance of their courses, over lunch or in the hallways. First-year law school classes regularly generate as many as a half dozen sections of the same course (e.g., Contracts, Constitutional Law) simultaneously, providing ample opportunity for faculty interaction regarding courses currently being taught. These opportunities are especially valuable to junior faculty, who, if they are teaching first-year classes, will almost invariably have several senior colleagues teaching the same course at the same time, who are eager to impart the wisdom they have derived from experience. It is also common (I know both from experience and observation) for junior faculty members teaching the same courses simultaneously to have almost constant conversations with one another about the day's material.

The policy of the Law School's Associate Dean for Faculty has been to afford priority in course selection to junior faculty. This means that junior faculty members ordinarily get first crack at teaching those courses that are likely to intersect with their research interests.

The Law School also has a "teaching chair," funded by alumni and specially designated for a faculty member with an established reputation for teaching excellence.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the Law School has been successful at generating a culture that values teaching. Some of the school's most successful scholars and leading institutional citizens are also its most talented classroom teachers. This conveys an important message to junior faculty: There is no inevitable tradeoff between good scholarship and good teaching. Indeed, quite to the contrary, teaching and scholarship can by synergistic. Investment of time and energy in teaching is never disparaged at Virginia, as it is at some other law schools. Junior faculty imbibe the lesson that good teaching is valued and expected.