Academic support often occupies an unusual position within law schools. We work directly with students, but we also work with faculty and administration. We think about individual learning challenges, but we also think about institutional outcomes. We help students prepare for their law school exams while also thinking about bar passage. We hear what students are saying in our offices, then walk into meetings where administrators are discussing retention, assessment, and strategic priorities.
We live at the intersections, which means that one of our most important professional skills may be one that doesn’t appear in a job description: translation. ASPs are often translators between students, faculty, administrators, and the bar. We take information from one part of the institution and help another part understand what it means. It’s an easy role to overlook, but it shouldn’t be.
Different parts of the law school often approach the same problem from very different perspectives. A student might say, “I studied for hours, but none of the questions looked like what we did in class.” The faculty member might hear: “The student doesn’t understand how to apply the doctrine.” Administration may see: “Our students are underperforming in this course.” The statements may all be describing the same phenomenon, and ASP is in a good position to connect them.
ASP can translate the student experience into a pedagogical question, the pedagogical question into an institutional concern, and the institutional concern into an intervention. This is extremely valuable work.
Translating Student Experience for Faculty
Students don’t always have the vocabulary to explain why they’re struggling. They may blame the professor or the exam, which are not always accurate diagnoses of the underlying problem. Academic support professionals are often most able to translate those struggles into the actual underlying problem. This then opens the door to an appropriate intervention for that student or class.
Translating Faculty Goals for Students
This works in the other direction too. Faculty may have sophisticated goals that students don’t recognize. For instance, a professor may give students an ambiguous hypothetical because the goal is to develop judgment. The student may misinterpret that ambiguity as hiding the ball. ASP can help bridge this gap. We can explain why uncertainty is part of legal reasoning, why professors often reward analysis over a conclusion, and how students can approach unfamiliar problems. Ultimately, ASP helps students understand the educational purpose behind what they’re being asked to do.
Translating Student Data to Administrators
Academic success professionals can sometimes see patterns that may not be immediately apparent in institutional data. More often, ASP can provide context for what the data is showing. For instance, a change in bar exam performance might reflect curriculum, student preparation, admissions trends, bar exam changes, or all of the above. ASP is often uniquely positioned to provide this context.
Translating Law School Learning into Bar Readiness
Perhaps nowhere is this role more obvious than in the transition from law school to the bar exam. Students often experience law school and bar preparation as separate worlds. In law school, they focus on individual courses, cases, faculty expectations, and semester-long assessments. Once they move to bar prep, they have to retrieve broad bodies of law, recognize patterns quickly, and perform consistently across multiple formats and subjects.
ASP helps students understand the connection. Every class doesn’t need to be solely focused on bar prep because ASP is able to help students recognize the transferable skills they’re developing and understand where they need additional bar-specific preparation.
Translation Requires Trust
ASP can be an institutional connector it its translator role, but this requires trust across the institution. It isn’t enough to have access to different groups. Students need to believe that ASP will listen without automatically taking sides. Faculty need to know that ASP isn’t simply delivering student complaints. Administration needs to trust that ASP’s observations are grounded in more than anecdote. This trust is built through careful communication. Rather than just saying “students are confused,” a more careful method is to say “I’ve heard this concern from several students. Here’s the specific point where they’re getting stuck, and here’s a possible way we can address it.” The second statement is translation.
Final Thoughts
Because this translation work is often informal, it can be easy to underestimate its value. But in order to communicate concerns effectively, ASPs are interpreting, synthesizing, diagnosing, connection, contextualizing, and communicating. All of these skills are professional expertise that belongs in key conversations.
ASP can often be described as the bridge between students and the institution, but perhaps translator is a better metaphor. A bridge connects two places, but a translator helps people understand one another. ASP has an opportunity to do both.
We help students understand what law school is asking of them. We help faculty understand what students are experiencing. We help administrators understand what the numbers don’t necessarily explain. We help institutions connect legal education with the demands of bar readiness.
This work is easy to overlook, but ASP is in the middle of it. Translation helps different members of the institution better understand one another, which may be one of the most powerful contributions ASP can make to a law school.
(Dayna Smith)
