Fostering and Assessing Law Student Teamwork and Team Leadership Skills

Skills of teamwork and team leadership are foundational for many types of law practice, but how much instruction, supervised experience, assessment, and guided reflection on these two skills did each reader as a law student receive? Law schools' formal curricula, in the author's experience, historically have not given much attention to the development of these skills. There also has been little legal scholarship on how most effectively to foster law students' growth toward later stages of teamwork and team leadership. Legal education must do better.

What is the next step for the 58 law schools that have adopted a learning outcome on teamwork or team leadership (plus those that will later adopt this type of outcome)? In Part II, this article outlines the next steps that competency-based education requires for a law school to implement a teamwork and team leadership learning outcome. In Part III, the article presents a stage development model for law student teamwork and team leadership skills. Part IV explains how to use the stage development model in the curriculum so that students can understand the entire range of stages of development of teamwork and team leadership.

The students can then self-assess their own current stage of development, and faculty and staff and a student's team members can use the model to observe and assess a student's current stage of development and give feedback to help the student grow to the next stage. Reflecting on self-assessment, teamwork experiences, and others' feedback, a student can create a written professional development plan to grow to the next stage of teamwork and team leadership and get coaching on the plan. The student can also assess the evidence the student has to demonstrate his or her level of development to potential employers.