Topic 4: Legal Knowledge I – Rethinking PBL

Topic 4: Legal Knowledge I

Rethinking PBL

Introduction
You are starting out on PBL again this year and will be doing so in a new group. You
may feel that you have the hang of PBL based on last year’s experiences but you will
probably find (if you have not already found) that each Year 1 group last year
developed slightly different practices during PBL. Even so, you might feel that you
understand PBL already.
Even so, we want you to spend some time in ALS thinking about PBL for a number
reasons:
1. To help you improve what you do: We expect that you are going to have to
spend a bit of time this year getting used to each other’s approach to PBL.
While doing so, you will find it useful to have answers to questions about why
you do things the way you do that are a bit more sophisticated and reasoned
than just saying, ‘That is how we did it last year.’
2. To give you opportunities to practice reflective learning: You may note a
link to experiential learning and reflection with both of the above reasons – we
are hoping that you will think about your experiences to gain useful insights
about how and why you do things during PBL sessions. We want you to have
reasons and opinions (preferably ones that are justified and objectively
justifiable) for what you do and why you improve. In other words thinking about
PBL is good for not only for improving how you learn and how you help others
to learn but also good practice of reflective learning.
3. To help you think about how to adapt PBL to practical contexts. A claim
for PBL is that (amongst other things) it helps you develop as a professional
lawyer (or another type of professional). That seems to make sense, but it is
unlikely that professional lawyers gather in groups of a dozen or so and go
through a specific seven-stage process based around a set of facts
summarised on a single sheet of paper. Nor do they do any such analysis
solely for so that they can come back exactly a week later to feed back on the
law in that area in general terms to other lawyers. So, if you are going to
benefit from all this PBL and particularly if you want to make out a case
(whether in your portfolio at the end of the year or in a job interview) that using
PBL has improved you as a potential professional, it will help you to be much
more conscious of what exactly it is about PBL (i.e. which aspects of it) are
likely to help and most importantly how you might adapt the classic PBL
method that you use in Foundations in Law into new and different situations
where you have to ‘learn’ or research the law. We will be putting this idea of
adapting PBL to new situations into practice during this year’s ALS simulations
and so it will be helpful for you to chart this process of adapting PBL to
Topic 4: Legal Knowledge I – Rethinking PBL

practical contexts and to think about how you might go about using PBL
techniques and practices out of a group setting (i.e. how you can use it in
independent learning). This may also help you to understand a little better how
lawyers work.
4. To help you develop your approach to defining research questions:
Perhaps the aspect of PBL that students most under-estimate is the skill of
drafting a useful research question. Remember that PBL is a process of
identifying what you need to find out so asking exactly the right question must
matter a lot. You may remember some situations last year where the LO you
left a PBL session with did not help you that much. You may have got better at
defining questions as last year progressed. You may still have room for
improvement (we are pretty sure everyone does as it is a complicated skill). In
ALS you have a chance to think at various points about whether you have
asked yourself questions in the right way – i.e. in a way that pointed you
towards what you really needed to know and helped you get there. While the
activities have a practical focus, this does not mean that you cannot also think
about how you go about putting together a useful question as an LO.
Developing this skill is central to much of the research you will do this year and
in future. In addition to getting the most of our FL modules, you will be asked to
do research during option modules, when you are given pieces of coursework
and next year on the dissertation module (for those of you on the 3-year
programme) or in the world of work (for those of you on the Senior Status)
programme. In fact, important as the other reasons above are, we might say
that this one is at the heart of what we are trying to do by using PBL and
having an MLO about research skills in ALS: if you are to get the most out of
our degree it will because you have made yourself better at looking at a
situation and working out precisely what it is you need to research. So the
skills of defining LOs and researching effectively to fulfil them are among the
most important that you can develop through this module.

Building on past experiences

To get ready for these various ways of using PBL and adapting it to new situations we
want you (again) to capture some ideas about how you have been doing PBL so far.
This is intended to be a quick task that should not involve much research but that will
raise questions and identify areas where you can usefully consolidate, deepen or
improve your understanding over the coming weeks. We will expect you to be
‘theoretical’ in your writing about how you go through a process of doing research by
the time of you reflect on it in your portfolio and using theory will improve your
reflection on your PBL practices but for now we are concentrating on the initial outline
reflection that will help you to identify areas to investigate more thoroughly later on.
Topic 4: Legal Knowledge I – Rethinking PBL

This is the link to the survey - you will get an email reply with your response so save it
(or, if you can, a pdf of the email) for you to use as evidence in your portfolio and to
support ongoing reflection and research.

Showing PBL in your Portfolio

We made a bit of a change to the MLOs for ALS this year. Last year PBL was part of
MLO 1 (learning theories) and now it is part of MLO 4 (legal knowledge and research
practices). There is a good reason for this – PBL matters because it is a way of
helping you to look at a situation (scenario, debate, dispute between parties, etc) and
to use it to work out what you need to research more fully and gain better
understanding of. This means that when you show PBL in your portfolio, it will be in
the form of thinking back over the simulations you will take on the module (a criminal
case, a civil case and a commercial matter) and trying to work out how well you did in
using the facts to work out what law you needed to know (and, of course, how well
you then went about finding that law and understanding it – but that is for later
Topics).
Let’s think a bit about how you might want to present your use of PBL in your final
portfolio and, therefore, how you might want to go about reflecting on it and finding
and preserving useful evidence.

What students have tended not to do so well in the past

Oddly (given how much of it you do), PBL has been one of the areas covered least
well in learning portfolios for ALS over the years. Students tend not to be very
reflective about how they might improve their PBL and often have not shown much
thought about how to adapt it to new situations (like professional lawyering). They
often do not show a great deal of awareness of why PBL is argued to be useful for
personal development and dealing with unfamiliar areas of knowledge. There is
therefore very little critical reflection on how effectively learning outcomes were
defined and used (perhaps the most central feature of PBL) and how this could be
improved.
We also have rather a lot of students who confuse PBL as a technique of finding out
the relevant law and case analysis (which we will look at later on) as a technique of
finding out the relevant facts. This is understandable up to a point – PBL does help
with aspects of getting your head round a set of facts and there is not a crude line
between understanding the facts and applying the law on those facts but do
remember that PBL is a method for allowing you to develop subject expertise. When
you have a PBL problem about Fred’s neighbour dispute with Angie, you do not (we
hope) come up with learning outcomes like ‘Why do people object to garden
gnomes?’ or ‘Why would Angie be so rude?’ (not on a Law programme anyway) but
would rather come up with outcomes asking questions about the law and legal issues
(rights, entitlements, remedies, etc). So, try not make this mistake with your PBL work
in ALS.
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What we would like to see in your portfolio

What we do want to see is evidence of your own personal development of PBL
techniques that arise from or relate to what you have been doing in ALS. Things to
focus on include how effective you were in analysing the case materials, what sort of
issues came out of your analysis and what learning outcomes you defined (and
whether the way you defined them helped you or not in getting ready to do legal
things).
Note that we do not do ‘feedback sessions’ on those problems but rather get on and
do practical things with what you have found out. These activities will reveal probably
gaps in your understanding. When that happens (i.e. when your advocacy misses a
key argument or you give the wrong advice in interview), that error of legal
understanding could take you back to the Learning Outcomes you defined or how you
interpreted them to see whether your legal errors have something to do with the
questions you set yourself. If you can identify this as a problem, that would be a great
start to reflecting on how you are doing PBL. In our experiences a lot of legal
difficulties come from the way LOs were drafted. They might also be partly related to
your legal research practices which we will look at more closely in later topics.

Compiling Evidence
Make sure that you have a good record of your initial PBL and also keep those initial
LOs under review as you progress through the case. If either you decide that you
have not quite got the questions right or new information leads you to revise what law
you need to know, then these changes to your initial LOs should be captured in some
format. When it comes to writing up on this in a portfolio you would then be able to
show how your LOs changed (and hopefully explain why). This will help you then
reflect on what a good Learning Outcome (or ‘Research Question’) is.
You will see that we are putting PBL to a slightly different use here to traditional PBL.
We are looking at practical legal research and so (from Week 3 onwards) we will be
thinking of practical PBL. This involves adapting your usual ways of doing PBL to one
in which you use your knowledge differently. We will particularly want to see thoughts
from you about how effective your LOs were for enabling you to do useful things. This
will therefore mean that you will need to show that you have thought about how
practical and useful LOs where when performing tasks. This therefore will involve
your reflective analysis and evidence joining up MLOs as follows:
 How you defined your LOs to help you carry out a particular task (MLO 4);
 The research you conducted into those MLOs to get you ready for that task
(MLO 4);
 The preparation for the task you created based on that research (here MLO4
connects with MLO 5 – the MLO that relates to carrying out communication
tasks);
 The actual performance for the activity (MLO 5); and
 The outcome of the performance of the activity (MLO5).
Topic 4: Legal Knowledge I – Rethinking PBL

Note how different MLOs inter-relate. In fact you will see that MLO 3 (how you look at
facts and what the factual disputes are) will have some bearing too but we will come
back to that more fully later. This inter-connectedness will have been less obvious in
Skills last year but is central to what is ‘Advanced’ about ALS and we will want you to
show, for example how correctly identifying what you need to know (PBL under MLO
4) enables accurate and effective research (MLO 4) to support preparation for and
performance of key skills to achieve effective ends (MLO 5). So, when it comes to
capturing evidence along the way, first of all make sure you do so – capture as many
of these steps as you can in each simulation – and secondly, make sure your
reflective writing during the year is exploring the relationship between these various
steps and stages.
As a practical tip, be willing to retrace these steps when you reflect. If your advocacy
performance did not work out the way you expected, look back and see what you did
previously that might have gone wrong, for example:
 I did not put forward the key arguments during my advocacy – could this be
due to the notes I was using?
 My notes did not apply the facts to the key legal test relevant to that application
– could that be due to the gaps in my legal research?
 My legal research did not identify the key primary legal sources that define the
relevant legal test for the advocacy I was conducting – could this be due to the
way that I defined the learning outcomes that I used to research this areas of
law.
 My learning outcome was vague and did not make clear to me that I needed to
understand the relevant legal test because I used the wrong words in defining
the question (I wrote ‘when can the court make an X order?’ rather than ‘what
test needs to be applied before the court can make an X order?’)
Of course not everything can be traced back to the LOs you define but a substantially
greater quantity of problems have this origin than most ALS students seem to have
recognised in the past so you should certainly be making a habit of retracing steps
from performance back to preparation back to research back to you framing of the
legal issues (and factual issues too, but that is for a later topic). This will help you gain
(and show through detailed evidence) much greater insights in your final portfolio.

For the Week 3 Session

In Workshop 2 (Week 3) you will spend a short period of time thinking about what
practical research and practical PBL involves. This might be rather different from PBL
used to learn the Law. Be ready to offer some ideas about what might be different in
such a situation. Think through these questions:
 Start off with this one - what are learning outcomes for? Why might it be
different to develop the skill of looking at a scenario and devising your own
LOs? Why do we not just give them to you and tell you what to research? Why
Topic 4: Legal Knowledge I – Rethinking PBL

might that be useful to you as undergraduate law students? How might that be
useful if you were to become a lawyer or other professional?
 If you are using PBL to get ready to represent a client in some future activities,
how might you have to change the PBL steps?
 Do you think that you might need to reach learning outcomes on different sorts
of things? (If you are about to represent a client in an unfamiliar situation, what
sorts of things might you need to find out about that might be different from
what you usually come up with in your PBL sessions)?
 In that situation, how might you have to change the way you write your learning
outcomes?
 What about after you have defined LOs. If you are using PBL to work out how
to represent a client in the next couple of months, might this be different from
your usual PBL when you come back next week? What if you are 'PBLing'
some papers to identify LOs for a client you are due to meet in half an hour?
How do you use those LOs differently?