Peer Critiques, Presentations, Group Work Scholarly Writing Class – Fall 2018 Robin Boyle, Prof of LW – St. John’s School of Law

2 credits, 7 class meetings This course replaced the independent supervised research projects. Combination of 7 class meetings and then one-on-one conferences with me Also included a movie – RBG!

Engagement Students were engaged in variety of ways: Peers on journals visited and talked about their journal experience Lexis/WL reps lectured on research PP slideshows and Textbook readings (Scholarly Writing - Fajans and Falk) Additional handouts

Graded Components Preliminary Thesis and Outline 5% Annotated Outline 10% First Draft of Research Paper 20% Final Research Paper 40% Oral Presentation 10% Peer Critique 15%

Peer Critiques Paired students (mine alphabetical but other profs were purposeful) – do not pair in reciprocal fashion. Give options – 1) Use rubric (I provided); 2) margin comments; or 3) one-two pages of written text. Most did #2 This was graded – students gave insightful comments To prep – We practiced as a class by critiquing an article from a foreign lawyer

Examples - critique provided by students “I think you ran into trouble with the overall framework of your paper. Maybe if you backed up and created an outline for your topic . . .” “The roadmap should hit the reader over the head. Say, first I’m going to talk about this, then this.” “I think this sentence would be stronger if you gave insight into [precedent case] holding.” “You should define third-party doctrine. Do not leave the reader to guess.”

Rubric Detailed – covered Intro/Thesis Organization Research Legal Analysis Citation Writing Style Conclusion

Oral Presentations Allow 15 – 20 minutes Students worked hard to present well Some used technology Graded To prep: practiced oral presentation one-on-one with the person who was critiquing them ***worked well Person who critiqued them was instructed to ask the first question

Group Work Mostly one-on-one - Discussed topic – verbally - Discussed annotated outline - Practiced presentation Divided class in half

Questions boyler@stjohns.edu