Academic support often arrives at the moment when something has gone wrong. Maybe it’s a student receiving a disappointing midterm grade. Perhaps a student realizes they are spending hours studying but aren’t retaining anything. That’s when academic support gets an email asking for time to meet.
We’re really good at responding to those moments. We help students identify the problem and diagnose what went wrong leading up to that moment. We work with them to develop a plan and connect with resources. We help them recover.
This work matters. But, whenever I get the email asking if I have time to meet after something went wrong, I often wonder: could I have prevented this problem in the first place?
I think there is a natural tendency to think about academic support as intervention. For instance, a student is placed on academic probation, and academic support intervenes to hopefully get that student on the right path. This model makes sense, but it also has a limitation in that the student had to experience a problem before we could respond to it. By the time the student seeks help, they may have developed ineffective study habits. They may have spent weeks misunderstanding a foundational concept. They may have fallen behind on reading, stopped attending class, or become disengaged from their peers because they believe they aren’t cut out for law school.
Once these things happen, academic support has to do more than just teach the correct skills. We have to help the students unlearn what they’ve spent months building their habits around. We also have to rebuild confidence and help them repair relationships that might have suffered. Ultimately, we have to help students catch up while simultaneously helping them continue to move forward.
This doesn’t mean we should abandon intervention. There will always be an event that shakes students’ confidence or a student who heads down the wrong study path. And, there will always be unexpected circumstances. Intervention is a key tool in the academic support toolbox, but it can’t be the only one.
Many academic support educators are already preventing rather than only intervening. We’ve finetuned our ability to spot patterns, and law school has a lot of predictable challenges. Just think about a new 1L. They have to learn how to read and brief cases, synthesize rules, apply doctrine, prepare for class, take notes, outline, practice legal analysis, write under time pressure, and study independently. We know every single one of these challenges is coming and that many students will struggle with some of them. So, our job is to consider how to teach the skills without waiting for to need an intervention.
For example, rather than waiting until November or the spring semester to hear from a student who doesn’t have a sustainable study routine, what if we taught all of the students how to build one early in the fall semester? This would be prevention. We don’t need to predict every point a student will struggle, but we can design our actions around the challenges we know students will encounter.
Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean adding 20 more workshops! Prevention isn’t just adding more programming or required meetings. The goal isn’t to give the students (or you!) more things to do. Instead, prevention works best when it meets students where they are. For example, it might mean partnering with a doctrinal professor to do a case briefing exercise that ties to their class. It could mean creating a resource that students can access at the moment they need it. Prevention causes us to ask where in the student experience we can make success more likely and plan accordingly. It creates efficiency because we can meet all of the students where they are and avoid the need for intervention later in the semester.
The goal of prevention isn’t to eliminate struggle, though. Students need to struggle to grow. They have to be challenged, make mistakes, and receive feedback. Prevention doesn’t eliminate struggle, but it helps to prevent avoidable difficulty from becoming a barrier to learning. There’s a difference between a student struggling because they are learning something difficult and a student struggling because they don’t know how to approach a task. It’s a fine line to walk, but academic support is primed to help identify that difference.
Prevention also helps with the stigma associated with seeking help. When we rely primarily on interventions, the academic support office becomes the place associated with failure or struggle. The idea that only students who need help go to academic support. That message can discourage the students who could benefit from academic support the most. By shifting to prevention, we send the message that academic skills are something every law student develops over time. Academic support becomes a normal part of professional development (because learning how to manage complexity, synthesize information, identify patterns, respond to feedback, and adapt are lawyering skills!)
I know everyone is in the chaos of the beginning of the semester, and many have already shifted to prevention. But I encourage everyone reading to set aside 10-15 minutes in the next week to brainstorm: is there a resource I can provide that would avoid a future student crisis? You never know, the best intervention might be the one you never have to make.
(Dayna Smith)
