Professor Hillary L. Burgess presented "Thank You for Adding Diversity, Now Conform: Understanding How Conversational Styles Can Impact Student Advising, Mentoring, and Classroom Participation" as a poster, sponsored by the Section on Minorities, at the AALS Annual conference. Professor Burgess also had a designated time to discuss the topic with interested members of the legal academy.

In her poster and presentation, Professor Burgess applied Deborah Tannen's work on conversational styles to teaching and learning in the law school. Professor Tannen had argued that when people with diverse conversational styles interact, they often misunderstand each other's conversational cues, and hence, misunderstand each other's meaning. Professor Burgess argued that these conversational differences can lead to significant, though unintended, discrimination for ethnic, gender, and regionally diverse law students when they interact with law professors. Professor Burgess further argued that law schools, and particularly law professors, have an affirmative duty to understand how conversational styles differ especially for ethnic, gender, and regional groups and to use this knowledge to mitigate even unintentional discrimination. Professor Burgess' article on this topic will be published in the Spring edition of The Law Teacher.

Professor Hillary L. Burgess co-edited and published the AALS Section of Academic Support Newsletter, The Learning Curve, with Professor Corie Rosen (ASU). Professor Burgess was invited to restore the publication after the publication was on hiatus for several years. Initial response to the call for articles was so overwhelming that Professors Burgess and Rosen were able to accept enough articles to create the first two editions. In the Fall edition, Professor Susan H. Joffe contributed a pivotal piece in the article about incorporating Academic Success and Legal Writing principles into doctrinal courses. The Spring edition, which focuses on providing effective feedback to students, will feature an article by Hofstra’s Professor J. Herbie DiFonzo.

Generally, The Learning Curve focuses on providing timely advice about counseling and advising students about legal analysis and the study of law. The publication also focuses on creating and developing successful Academic Success Programs. The edition was published in time for distribution at AALS with an enormous demand for and positive feedback about the newsletter.

Professor Hillary Burgess presented on a panel at AALS. Professor Burgess was selected from over forty proposals to present her topic, Designing Effective and Efficient Peer Exercises, with Susan Keller (Western State). The presentation focused on how to effectively design peer exercises to create meaningful learning and feedback for students. In her presentation, Professor Burgess emphasized the benefit to law professors of using peer exercises to cover more topics in more detail and depth, provide pedagogically sound methods of giving students feedback throughout the semester, all while not increasing a professor’s grading responsibilities. The objective of the presentation was to give professors teaching tools for meeting the ABA’s standards encouraging more feedback and outcome measurements.

With Professor Keller, Professor Burgess will be co-authoring and submitting this presentation for consideration of inclusion in the Techniques for Teaching 2 book, co-authored by Steve Friedland (Elon), Sophie M. Sparrow (Franklin Pierce), Gerald Hess (Gonzaga), and Michael Hunter Schwartz (Washburn). Also on the panel were moderators Emily Randon (UC Davis), Robin Boyle (St. John’s), and Kathy Garcia (LaVerne), co presenters Barbara Glesner-Fines (UMKC), Sophie Sparrow (Frankline Pierce), Barbara McFarland (Chase), and Tonya Washington (Georgia State).

Professor Hillary Burgess was cited in the Katz & O’Neill journal article entitled, Strategies and Techniques of Law School Teaching: A Primer for New (and Not So New) Professors, a journal article that has been downloaded over 1,300 times on SSRN. The article was published as a book in 2009 by Aspen publishers. Professor Burgess was cited for her idea that novice law students often learn best by learning “backward.” This concept stems from the “expert reversal effect,” a tested theory that posits that novices approach learning opposite the way experts approach learning, so the procedures and structures for incorporating new knowledge that seem obvious to experts cause novices to struggle. Professor Burgess applied this theory to the law school context by suggesting that new law students might learn more and struggle less by briefing their cases backward by starting with discreet reasoning, building to a rule of law, determining the legal issue, then identifying the key, relevant facts. Her short piece was published by the Section on Teaching Methods, entitled Beginners Brief Best By Briefing Backward.

Professor Hillary Burgess presented a faculty development workshop at Mercer University Law School. Previous presenters included Michael Hunter Schwartz (Washburn) and Gerry Hess (Gonzaga). Professor Burgess focused her workshop on understanding theories and practices that relate to novice learning. Specifically, she discussed the hierarchical nature of levels of learning within Bloom’s Taxonomy of learning objectives. She discussed the implications of cognitive load theory, working memory, and schema creation on 1L fall curricular choices and teaching methods. The workshop was well received.

Professor Burgess would like to thank the members of Hofstra’s faculty who mooted her faculty development workshop, including Yishai Boyarin, J. Herbie DiFonzo, Eric M. Freedman, Stefan Krieger, Andrew Schepard, and Roy D. Simon, and the Mercer faculty for their welcoming hospitality and participation.