From GFOI Sharon Press:
Dear Colleagues,
Like many of you, we are thrilled to see a session added to the program about “living room conversations,” where Section of Dispute Resolution Chair Ben Davis will speak about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his assassination. We agree with Ben about its importance and relevance, and we urge everyone to participate.
AND…the scheduling difficulties for the conference means that this amazing session will occur at the same time as the Legal Educators’ Resource Share is supposed to happen.
AND…we can’t imagine asking all of you to choose which session to attend (not to mention that we’d like to participate in the Living Room Conversations).
AND…therefore, we have decided that this year’s resource share will simply have to be an “asynchronous” experience. We’re up to it, and we hope you are as well.
For those of you who have never been to the Resource Share, we started it to give another opportunity to legal educators to share their best ideas about resources being used to liven up their DR classes. We think this year will be the 6th annual Resource Share. The first one was held at a conference breakfast, so perhaps we have come full circle.
Our asynchronous proposal is multi-faceted. Importantly, we will still collect your valuable information and produce a 2018 updated version. This means you still need to think about (and come ready to share) helpful resources you use in your classes – a website, simulation, TED talk, other specific podcasts, etc. and be prepared to “tell” us where/how to find the resource and how to use it/debrief it, etc., in your ADR-related classes. The “telling” will just be different this year.
First, we will expand our opportunities to gather this information by having a form you can fill out at the Mitchell Hamline exhibit table throughout the conference. Second, there will be flip charts at the breakfast on Saturday morning where you can also record your information. Third, we will circulate at the breakfast and try to capture your “best new teaching idea” if options 1 and 2 don’t work for you. Fourth, we might catch you during the conference breaks and jot down your ideas. And of course, for those of you who are super organized, please feel free to email Sharon your ideas in advance of (or after) the conference so that they will be included in the 2018 compilation.
You can also bring half page handouts to distribute at the breakfast describing your teaching resource/tool if this is appropriate. We will collate all the information after the conference and post it to the legal educators’ listserv so everyone can reap the benefits of our wonderfully generous DR educators. (In fact, we produce a running tally of all the years’ Resource Share suggestions for folks who are new to this.)
We are excited to try out this new approach, and hope this will prove to be a terrific way to capture new ideas without the usual face-to-face session. Thanks in advance for your support… we look forward to seeing you soon!
Sharon Press and Bobbi McAdoo
