Chapter 7. ICE in an Advanced Legal Research Course

7.1 Instructional Context

Christa Bracci – Queen’s University

The ICE framework was a useful tool in my Advanced Legal Research course, both for assessment and as a way of encouraging upper-year law students to think about their own learning. In order to keep up with rapid changes in the law and in the legal practice environment, early-career lawyers need to learn quickly and purposefully, integrating new knowledge rapidly and applying it to novel contexts.  To help students become more self-regulated learners, I introduced the ICE framework on the first day of the course and gave them regular opportunities to apply it in formative exercises as well as in two summative assessments. Students used the framework as a way to characterize and identify gaps in their learning, and describe the progression of their skills acquisition in legal research.  As an instructor, the framework helped me to be more transparent in expressing my expectations around student performance.  Going forward, it is a portable tool that students could use in support of learning across contexts, both in law school as well as in legal practice.

The ICE framework first came to my attention in late 2017, when I was revising my course materials for Advanced Legal Research (ALR), an elective, full-credit course for upper-year law students. More than eight years had passed since I had last taught the course.  In consulting course texts and articles on teaching and learning in this area, two important considerations became apparent.

First, before I first taught legal research, some scholars had argued for a shift in legal research pedagogy, away from the so-called “bibliographic approach” and toward a more process-oriented model, based on active problem-solving (Berring, 2008).^[1] Rather than simply identifying resources, students needed to understand how these resources were created, how they were related, and how to choose resources that were a good match for the type of legal problem that needed to be addressed, in order to create effective strategies for information location and retrieval. The literature suggested that process-based pedagogy had taken hold(Kaplan & Darvil, 2008; Davis et al., 2013; Calister, 2012).

Second, the range of research tools and resources for legal research, and the main points of access, had changed dramatically. With the shift to process-based instruction came a concurrent shift to electronic-based (rather than print-based) legal research.  But the sheer volume of legal information available online was enormous. Tools and databases were proliferating. Students would need to deal with the same, if not an accelerated, rate of growth and change in online information during their early career, and they would need the skills to manage the volume, continually and quickly learn what emerging tools or resources were able to offer, and successfully select the right resources for a given research problem.  In other words, in order to keep up with online legal research in a practice environment, students would need to be able to identify gaps in their skill sets, address those gaps quickly and efficiently, and do so in the midst of a busy practice.

It was important that the ALR course respond to these realities. Law students see mastery of legal research as key to their success.  Students in all roles – summer interns at law firms, articling students – as well as early-years associates will spend a large portion of their day seeking relevant legal and non-legal information in support of ongoing client matters. What’s more, such research often occurs at the cutting edge of the law’s development.  To stand out, it is not enough to be merely competent; students want to build a skill set that will set them apart from their peers.

Change is a constant in the practice of law, and since constant learning is required, law students benefit from becoming more expert, more self-regulated learners (Schwarts, 2003; Calister 2014; Santangelo & Gundlach 2019). Professor Elizabeth Bloom (2017) of Northeastern University School of Law notes,

Educational psychology research instructs us that the best way to create successful law students and lawyers is to teach our students to become self-regulated learners. Self-regulated learners take responsibility for their own learning by using metacognition …. This entails approaching each learning task by first identifying the precise learning goal, then developing strategies for engaging in and monitoring understanding until the task is successfully completed.

Indeed, a law student’s success depends greatly on their ability to constantly, relentlessly, level-up their knowledge base and skill-set(Callister, 2012). Yet law students often fail to see that learning how to learn is, itself, an essential skill when you work in a rapidly changing environment. ^[2]

The ICE framework held potential for introducing students to elements of metacognitive awareness in the legal research classroom. It provided a conceptual vocabulary that students could use to talk about and reflect on their own learning.  It also gave me a way of articulating my expectations around student performance more clearly, in both learning outcomes and in assessments.