There is a particular moment in law school when a student realizes that someone else seems to know everything. The professor asks a question, and another student immediately answers. Or a classmate can explain a complicated doctrine in what sounds like effortless language. This often leaves the student sitting quietly in the back of the room thinking: I don’t know how they know all of this. Maybe they’re just better at this than I am.
As academic support educators, we spend a lot of time teaching students how to learn. But maybe we need to also be wondering if our students believe they can become the kind of person who knows things deeply. In other words, do students see expertise as something they can develop or as something that other people simply have?
Here’s the thing – expertise often looks like a personality trait. Students rarely see the process that produced someone else’s expertise; they only see the final product. They see the student who can answer every question and the attorney who can explain a legal issue without looking at their notes. They also see the professor who seems to have an answer for every question.
What they don’t see are the hours of reading and practicing. They don’t see the mistakes, feedback, and repetition. They don’t see how the individual formed increasingly sophisticated mental connections that produced that performance. Expertise is often invisible as it develops, and the result is that students can mistake familiarity for talent. For example, a student who has encountered a particular concept before appears naturally knowledgeable when it comes up again. We know there’s nothing natural about these things, but students don’t always realize that.
This is particularly challenging in law school. Starting law school is joining an entirely new intellectual environment. Students are encountering new language, unfamiliar expectations, and dense material. Most importantly, students are surrounded by people who are accustomed to being successful, meaning a student who has spent their academic career near the top of the class may suddenly find themselves surrounded by equally accomplished students. This creates a jarring psychological shift, often causing imposter syndrome. Students can withdraw – participating less, asking fewer questions, and hesitating to seek feedback. Ironically, the behaviors that can help students develop expertise are the ones they start to avoid.
How do we address this as academic support educators? One of the most important things is making the process of expertise more visible. Students need to understand the process behind developing expertise. Faculty can model this by showing how they arrive at an explanation or answer. An academic support professional could explain how to reason through a particular question and what to do when a student gets stuck. Students need to see that experts think, look things up, make mistakes, and revise their thinking. We can begin to normalize and model this.
Another thing we can teach students is that expertise doesn’t mean knowing everything. In fact, expertise often makes people better at recognizing what they don’t know. ASP, then, should help students become people who know how to ask questions. This means normalizing questions like what am I missing? What distinction matters? What facts would change the outcome? These are all questions that help students develop expertise.
Finally, we should teach students that expertise requires feedback. Exposure alone cannot develop expertise. Law students need to practice, receive feedback, and then try again. They need to start to notice patterns in their mistakes. Academic support professionals can help students analyze their performance with the intention of creating a path forward for the next time they encounter a similar problem. Students should also note their growth as they seek feedback. Often students focus on what they don’t do well or can’t do yet, instead of noticing how far they’ve come. Academic support can help make that improvement visible by helping students analyze feedback.
Ultimately, showing students how to develop expertise is not only ASP’s job, but we can play a role. Students need to know that expertise isn’t a club that you either enter or don’t. It is a process. Every student can know more tomorrow than they do today, and every student is in the process of becoming an expert. Our job in academic support is to help them develop the capacity to find, evaluate, apply, question, and build knowledge for themselves. Because the ultimate goal of law school isn’t for students to leave knowing everything. It is for them to leave believing that they can learn what they don’t know.
(Dayna Smith)
