The Faculty should reconsider their decision to shorten small groups to one semester
For the first time at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, students in 1L finishing their fall semester also wrapped up their small group classes for the year. Prior to the Faculty’s restructuring of the 1L curriculum for the 2020-2021 academic year, small groups spanned both terms. As a 1L student who just finished her small group class, I am disappointed by the Faculty’s decision.
I came from a relatively small undergraduate program where the instructors knew all their students by name. This was a great opportunity to not only get to know my instructors well but also to forge genuine friendships with my classmates. I was excited to replicate this experience with my small group class, especially during the pandemic, where it can be difficult to foster new relationships. While I was able to form connections with my professor and peers, they would undoubtedly be stronger and more meaningful if we had more than one semester together.
Additionally, reducing small groups to one semester removed approximately 13 hours of class instruction time. My small group had to skip over not only individual cases but entire topics as a result. Though I enjoyed the class, I fear that we skipped over important content that may become relevant in upper year classes.
According to the Faculty’s JD program website, the purpose of small groups is to provide students with a “seminar-style learning experience in which students interact closely with a law professor and fellow students in a convivial learning environment.” While my small group professor certainly made an effort to allow for class discussion and debate, this came at the expense of covering more material due to the reduction in class hours.
I am not suggesting that small group professors choose a greater breadth of content over engaged analysis — indeed, intimate class discussions are what make the small groups so valuable — but rather that they return to their original full-year structure. This way students may benefit from both the seminar-style delivery of content and the ability to cover all the necessary material of a general substantive course, as was historically the intent.
Logistically speaking, the restructuring of the 1L curriculum made it so that nearly all of my 1L written assignments (assigned by both my small group and legal research and writing class) were due within the first four months of my law school journey. In addition to a stressful first term of overlapping deadlines, having almost all my written assignments due the first semester of law school made it difficult to employ any skills I learned in my LRW class, and demonstrate improvement in my writing.
While acknowledging that I have not undergone the alternative to fully compare the small group structures, I strongly believe that my classmates and I would have benefited from the full-year of small groups the 1Ls before us experienced. Through discussions with my friends, both within my cohort and in upper years, the general consensus is that we feel the decision to shorten small groups to one semester was made in haste and based on largely unfounded claims.
These concerns echo those made by students during last year’s 1L Curriculum Change Student Consultation Townhall. Students expressed concerns about the lack of student consultation and lack of evidence supporting any benefits from the change. Many students even signed a petition urging the Faculty Council to reject any curriculum changes until these concerns could be addressed.
During the March 2020 Faculty Council meeting, many professors observed the lack of frank faculty consultation for the change and emphasized the value of keeping the small group classes full-year, a very deliberate decision made by the Faculty Council in 2010 when proposing to semesterize 1L classes. As my small group professor, Professor Alan Brudner, put it, there is a “general consensus that small group was the jewel of our program at U of T Law.”
According to a statement by Associate Dean Essert, the changes to the 1L curriculum this year were due to constraints imposed by COVID-19 and “are not meant to reflect any decision about the ideal structure of small groups.” Nonetheless, as stated by the Students’ Law Society, the Faculty chose to implement the controversial changes without adequate student input and without going through the typical process of passing multiple rounds of Faculty Council. The SLS were only made aware of these changes when course schedules were released mid-summer.
As Professor Jim Philips discussed in his defense of first-year small groups, even if the changes were to the benefit of the 1L class, the decision should not have been rushed and there should have been the opportunity for ample dialogue. The final decision to semesterize the 1L curriculum in 2014 was a result of a large amount of research and debate that took place over a number of years with extensive consultation and discussion, and an approving vote at the Faculty Council. Why should a decision that significantly alters the 1L curriculum not undergo the same rigorous process?
1L students are not guinea pigs for the Faculty to test curriculum changes that lack majority student (and even faculty) support, and are not grounded in evidence nor consultation. The pandemic has already made this year drastically different for us. We have lost the benefits of in-person learning, networking events, employment opportunities, socials, and many other things that drew us to pursue our studies at the University of Toronto. The change to the 1L curriculum has forced us to lose yet another opportunity to foster a deep relationship with our peers and a law professor, and has further alienated our first year experience from those before. The Faculty cannot undo our experience, but they ought to reconsider this decision moving forward.
