Making Legal Education Count I am Principal Lecturer for the Practitioner Portfolio at Nottingham Law School. In this role, I develop tailored continuing professional development courses for law firms and individual practitioners and oversee a team of NLS tutors and practitioner consultants who regularly teach on the courses. I joined the Law School in 2002. Before that, for many years as a qualified solicitor, I practised commercial litigation with a national law firm. My role at NLS ranges from leadership of strategy for the Practitioner Portfolio to line management of colleagues and external faculty, coaching students for negotiation and mediation competitions and designing and delivering practical courses for practitioners which emphasise the skills required in the practice of law and how delegates may develop their skills after the course. I coach colleagues in leadership and management, sit on course design committees in the University and am a member of the School Academic Standards and Quality Committee. One of the most common complaints My Legal Life With Joy Davies Formal legal education is difficult to balance, requiring both theoretical and practical training with subsequent real-world benefits to be truly effective. We hear more on the subject in this feature from Joy Davies, Principal Lecturer for the Practitioner Portfolio at Nottingham Law School, who brings a wealth of experience in tailoring courses for law firms and individual practitioners. MY LEGAL LIFE 23 about formal legal education and training is that, whilst the experience may be interesting and even enjoyable, nothing happens afterwards as a result. There is no ‘bottom line’ benefit. Whilst we cannot control what delegates do or do not do differently once they leave the course, we can offer some guidance on how to maximise the chances of delegates translating their learning into relevant action for their practice. The practitioner courses at NLS are all based on an approach to learning called reflective practice. The approach encapsulates much of the classic theory about how adults learn. ‘Continuing’ is the focus of our courses which require delegates to reflect on what they have experienced in their practice, on the course and following the course. Our aim is to introduce tools for the development of these skills, provide a framework for practising those suggested methods and encouraging, by application of reflective practitioner principles, to adapt their learning to other contexts. The pedagogy is transformative and produces graduates with the
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