Lisa Silver

Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of Calgary

Interviewed December 2020 by Martina MacFarlane

MM Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and about what you do?

LS I am an associate professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Calgary. I teach first year Criminal Law, and Evidence to second-year students. Both are mandatory courses. I am also course director for the Trial Advocacy course in which all third-year law students participate.

MM How has your teaching changed so far in 2020?

LS It has not changed the way that I approach my teaching, but it has changed in terms of my own feelings surrounding the practice. I know we like to use the word pivot. I’m not sure if I like that word so much, but I guess that’s the way to describe it. It just happened so fast. On March 13 I was supposed to have a special guest in my Criminal Law class. The night before, she emailed me and she said, what do you think? And I said, I don’t know. And then, it came out that classes were cancelled. That was a Friday, and I had to teach the next week.

So, then that feeling creeps in where, as an instructor, the situation is out of your control. As lawyers, we like to have control over our files and our information. Preparation is huge for lawyers. That’s an important characteristic of a successful lawyer. So, to not have that control in March was a bit scary. Then as we went along knowing that the Fall semester was going to be online, I developed a feeling of okay, well, I am going to really get down to business and learn as much as I can about how an effective course runs online. I started asking myself, what can I do? What are the best practices? In some ways, best practices were what I ended up just doing by the seat of my pants. In March, I flipped my class. I created narrated PowerPoint presentations and then spent the time in class doing a lot of problem solving and reviews of the concepts. At the core, I’m doing the same thing this term, but I got there not by the seat of my pants, but by ensuring best practice.

I did a lot during this period. I went to the workshops and presentations offered by the Teaching Institute, and they also offered a North American teaching conference that was outside of Arizona. I went to some of those too. I did my due diligence. I wanted to see if there was anything cool that I could get out of this as an instructor. I wanted to know—are there new innovations? Am I doing this the right way? Does someone have a better idea?

One of the things that I took to heart was looking at my syllabus in a different way. The syllabus wasn’t the home anymore. D2L had to be the class and the primary platform for what I was going to do. It wasn’t easy to embrace that as your classroom environment and it means that you really must put a lot of time into building its structure. I ended up simplifying a lot of my concepts. As an instructor, you fall in love with your syllabus because you made it. You think every single one of those cases is so important. If a student asked you, which one is more important, you’d say, they’re all important. You’re going to be examined on all of that because it’s all important. These are all new students who don’t have prior experience, and I’ve practised in criminal law for over thirty years. So, you can imagine my view that every case is amazing. But what it made me do was let go of some of the small stuff. What I did instead was make lesson objectives for each of my topics, and that helped me to cut things out. I said to myself, what do I really need these students to know and what is reasonable, considering they’re in their first year and we’re now online? I wrote four, maybe five objectives for each class or topic area, and I stuck to it. If there was a case that was doing something other than what I wanted, I cut it. I ended up trimming the course.

The other issue that I had was that our first-year students all take the same mandatory curriculum, and they get separated into three different classes, with about forty-three students in each class. This year though, during COVID, one of our criminal law professors moved back to Victoria. When he left, that meant that my colleague and I each had sixty-seven students. There’s a big difference between forty and sixty-seven. The trimming really helped, because I ended up narrating all my PowerPoint presentations using the information that I had trimmed out of the required reading.

So, I ended up looking at my syllabus and deciding that really what I was teaching were modules. I put topics into four of them for the Fall, and four for the Winter. I’ve got sub-topics under each module, and then for each module I do three activities. Activity One is the reading. Activity Two is the narrated PowerPoints. I’ve also turned these into podcasts as an alternative in case the students prefer to just listen and not see. And then activity three is the Zoom class. I divide my class into two breakout groups because the Zoom class is for quick review and problem solving. I’ve decided that I’m going to repeat the quick review and problem solving for both groups. I’ve really tried hard to build a D2L platform that is user friendly, so that all the students have to do when they get to the Zoom class is go into each module, sub-topic or unit, and they know what to do for each one of them. This way they also know what they need to do before they come to class.

MM It sounds like you’ve really used the opportunity to streamline your content and distill everything down. You’ve painted a good picture of what your teaching looks like at the moment, and you’ve touched on some opportunities and challenges already but maybe you can focus in on these and tell us more.

LS The opportunity was to rethink a course that I’d taught for six-plus years. I always do some tweaking every time I teach, but you don’t often do the big rethink. The opportunity was to ask, what am I really doing? Why am I doing it? And those lesson objectives were helpful for me because they made me understand why I was teaching these particular cases and what I expected from the students. I think it gave me an opportunity to do things better, because I think there’s always an opportunity to do things better. It made me open myself up rather than saying, no, I’m perfect. It’s a perfect course. There’s no way I’d ever change it.

As for the challenges, one thing that we pride ourselves on in the law faculty is community. Community matters to me—I always have an open door. I encourage students to come and see me. Students that graduate stay in touch with me and I have a relationship with the students. It’s difficult to create that community online. With the way that the D2L for the course was created, some of the students have said that it shows you really care. I mean, I think that helps, but I feel a little sad that it’s just not going to be the same as much I try. I stay back after the class for students to ask questions but also just to hang out. In my Group A, I already have two or three students that like to hang out, and they just want to talk. That’s awesome. I love it. But in my Group B I have nobody, which I think is funny. It’s hard if you are someone who likes the interaction with the students. Of course, lecturing is not the same online. It just isn’t. We’re not having the same two-way discussion and there’s always a time lag. Students have to use that electronic “raise hand” button. It’s amazing how different it is when you’re in person, face-to-face. There’s a flow that’s missing online.

So that’s a challenge, and to be honest, I think I’ll see other challenges after the midterm. I think after the midterm, which is a low stakes exam by the way, I’ll be able to see and judge based on students’ past performance whether this new format is really working. I am a little worried about that. If they were upper year students, I wouldn’t worry as much because they already have a lot of the knowledge on how a lawyer thinks, and how to analyze. But I figured that the other opportunity is the opportunity itself to just try, just do it, and see what happens.

MM So, in this great experiment of testing, midterms, and those kinds of things, have you altered your approach to creating those tests at all?

LS Well, the difficulty with the law program is that the marks are one hundred percent weighted on exams. That’s the tradition, and we’ve tried to move away from that approach, but the difficulty is that this is just how it works. Between the three mandatory courses I’m involved in—Criminal Law, Evidence, and the Trial Advocacy course - by the end of a student’s life in law school, I will have taught them. I’ve tried different things for the different courses.

One year in Evidence, I tried to do more small assignments so that the exam would be weighted less. But the reality is that we must be mindful about what the students are doing in their other courses. If too many courses are doing other kinds of assessments, then the students have too much to do during the term. So, it’s not just up to me. I can’t just say, I’d like to give the students three book reviews. Reading has to happen in my course, I would say at least 20–25 pages a week. So, times that by five other courses, right? It’s a fine balance.

What I’ve tried to do though is self-assessments. Some of my units under a few of my modules in Evidence are D2L only. They’re just activities online and they are backed by more background information to get students comfortable with the concepts we’re learning in class. I’ve also done some self-assessment quizzes. They are not marked or graded. I’ve been using a similar technique in the Zoom class with some very easy polls. As soon as the students get on to the Zoom class, they have four or five questions that are a very big picture, just to make sure they understand these very basic concepts before we launch into more of the specifics. So, I am trying to rethink non-grading assessments. More informative and less summative. I’m trying to do it that way and I’ll see if that’s successful.

MM In your journey through this term so far, what’s your most-used software or tool?

LS Well, obviously, I’m using D2L and Zoom the most. Another one is Google Jamboard, which I love. I used it in the first class, and it was really good. I’ve used Mentimeter to do word clouds and I think those are great too. I like using those three things, and in Zoom itself, obviously I use breakout rooms.

MM Just as a curious side note, had you used any of these platforms or tools before COVID?

LS I hadn’t used Jamboard at all. I used it over the summer with Student Legal Aid, or SLA, our student legal services here at the University of Calgary. These are law students who help people who don’t have enough money for a lawyer with their simple criminal offences. When I did a seminar for the SLA on evidence, I did a Jamboard to open it up. The question was, “SLA matters because ... ” and I almost cried. It is amazing how people can share in this anonymous way, especially when it’s a question that is meaningful for them. Many said such beautiful things about why it’s so important to help people in need. I loved it. So, I’m a huge fan of Jamboard and these types of resources for this reason, but I also know there’s only so much that you can ask people to reflect on. I think reflection is important, but I think you can have fatigue from that too. But no, I had never used Jamboard before COVID, and I think I used Mentimeter once in class. COVID has given me an opportunity to use some fun stuff, for sure.

MM Like you say, it’s interesting to see how people come out of their shell when they’re in their own home, in a comfortable space, and feel safe enough to do that.

LS Yes, because it’s anonymous. And what’s nice is that it’s anonymous in a positive way. I think this aspect promotes a healthy class environment.

MM So then, what is your favourite resource for teaching online? We have talked about tools, but is there any place that you look to for inspiration?

LS I look at the Teaching Institute and I feel that their resources have been really helpful. I’ve looked at resources done by other universities as well. Even in our own library, there are very useful books, podcasts, and audio books. There are lots of good teaching and learning resources out there, which you can either purchase or get for free, that you can listen to, or that you can read. I’ve also used our tech coaches. They’ve gave me help with making the podcast and they helped me learn how to troubleshoot some of the technical issues that came up, which has been great.

MM It’s interesting to think about all the learning that is coming out of this situation, at every level. Even those micro-tech things that everyone is learning about. Following all these developments and changes, things will be fairly uncertain for the next few months. What would you expect or hope that higher education might look like in ten years’ time?

LS I do hope that higher education doesn’t go completely online. Obviously, it’s an important aspect to have contact with the students, and to have the ability to relationship-build. I think it’s important for students’ own mental health, to be honest, not just because you learn better face-to-face. I think it’s just the way we are; we’re tuned to be social people. But I do hope that the technology still stays. There is something to be said about being able to teach an online course. In law, we just don’t do that. It’ll be interesting to see if this now becomes part of what we offer on a regular basis. That could open up other possibilities too, possibilities such as more international teaching. We tend to shut down come April or May in terms of teaching and we usually don’t teach during the summer, but this year our faculty did because of COVID. Maybe we will start offering more courses over the summer, which may mean that students are finishing their degrees earlier. But if that happens, we’re a profession, and we can’t do things in a vacuum. However, when we change our educational approach, this needs to be done hand-in-hand with the legal community. We have to bring in more of the firms and the law society. If we’re serious, we need to approach this in a more holistic way.

MM Absolutely. Are you seeing collaboration, and these kinds of reflections with the profession?

LS Well, one of the courses that I am doing in the winter is my Trial Advocacy course. I have 130 students that I break into twelve small groups, and they perform as part of an experiential learning curriculum. I have members of the legal community, and judges from the Court of the Queen’s Bench come in and be the group instructors for each class. Normally they would do it in person, and you can imagine how they perform. There is lots of feedback and reflection. Well, now I have to move this whole process online. That’s a real challenge, but I have to say, I have well over forty volunteers from the legal community, and they’ve been great. After one lawyer expressed the community’s obvious concern about conducting trials and advocacy online, I asked her to come in and do a little mini lecture about it. I want to record some of the demonstrations that the lawyers typically do live. I’ve already had one lawyer say, great, we’ll take care of it, we’ll do one of these demos, don’t worry about it. So, I think that my course is really a litmus test for the way that the profession perceives what we’re doing. I think they’re seeing that there is value in our students knowing how to do lawyering online. Firms are really looking for people who can use this technology.

MM Lisa, thank you so much for sharing these experiences with us. Is there anything else that you wanted to add to our conversation?

LS I’d like to mention the mental health aspect. I think we tend to let that slide, and I think it’s important both as teachers and learners and for our students, that we really be cognizant of those issues because it is isolating. And I feel it too. You must compensate for that somehow. And I think that you have to ensure that you use your social skills as much as you can. That’s important, I think, as a teacher as well.

MM Do you think that there are ways to build in little catches within courses? It is such an intangible thing, but we’re all experiencing it, right?

LS Well, I’ll give you an example. I made a point in my course outline to put in an EDI statement, which stands for Equity Diversity and Inclusivity. I thought it was especially important for online classes because there is now the ability to hide behind technology. You can forget that you are in a class with a bunch of people and that you need to be respectful and inclusive. As part of it, I said that this online classroom is a safe place. If you don’t feel safe, then come speak to me because I want to be sure that you feel safe in my classroom. Just recently I received an e-mail about that, and I’ve never had those issues before. So, I feel that we must be even more responsive to students’ emotional well-being, because I think it’s easy to feel isolated in a Zoom classroom, and to feel that things aren’t right. You don’t get the same cues as you do when we are in person. Online, the cues are different. So, I’m glad I did that. It’s important to take measures such as these even if you’re not online. I did it specifically because I wondered whether my presence as an instructor makes the students act differently. When my presence isn’t in person, does it then allow for people to not feel as safe? In criminal law, we discuss a lot of controversial subjects. We talk about people who die from violence. Next term, I’ll talk about sexual assault. So, the mental health and safety aspect is an important thing to remember.

MM That’s right, we’ve lost so many of those social cues. Because of that, it’s obviously more important than ever to open up that space where people can speak freely if they need to say something or get something off their chest and just feel a little safer.

LS Exactly.

MM Well, thank you so much for chatting with us today, Lisa.

LS Thank you!

Reflection

COVID-19, instead of creating an unknown future, is beginning to recede, taking with it the anxieties and concerns we all experienced as educators. This does not mean we are back to the old ways of course delivery. Nor does it mean that we can jettison the teaching and learning practices we once successfully employed. Rather, we now have a unique opportunity to integrate our learnings from the past year into our in-class environment. We can take what works and modify it by making it better. That’s what I intend to do as I prepare for Fall 2021.

The interview I gave in December of 2020 speaks of opportunity and change. The pandemic gave me a reason to rethink my approach to teaching and to reflect on best practice. This reflection was done in the online environment, but it applies equally to in-person teaching and learning. In my interview, I explained how I used D2L to create a virtual classroom for the students. D2L became the roadmap for the students’ success. I intend to recreate this D2L space for my in-person class this Fall. D2L will not take the place of the classroom but it will support it.

This is what I learned during the year teaching online—that meaningful support matters, be it academic or personal. In my interview, I expressed concern about my ability to bridge the digital gap and build a strong relationship with my students. To my surprise, I found I could do so by creating a supportive atmosphere built on trust and respect. In some ways, I feel I know my students even better than when I taught in person. Yes, the social cues I spoke of in the interview are different online but in place of those cues I became more intentional in my learning and teaching practices. Being intentional requires me to acknowledge the communication gaps and embrace them by finding alternative ways to engage with my students.

The pandemic, instead of pushing people apart, pulled us in the same direction. I became acutely aware of EDI practices online and this awareness will now be implemented in my in-class space. Mental health concerns were at the forefront online and will continue to be so offline as well. The pandemic taught me that support makes us stronger and is not a sign of weakness. Showing support may be as simple as a word of encouragement or extra help after class. Support may also be the directing influence I use to decide on course objectives, assignments, and assessment. Sometimes a little bit of humanity goes a long way.

About

Lisa Silver is a proud Calgarian, lawyer, educator, and avid blogger. She holds a BA in Economics (UWO, 1984), an LL.B. (Osgoode, 1987), and an LL.M. (Calgary, 2001). She is a member of the Bars of Ontario (1989) and Alberta (1998). As a criminal lawyer, Lisa has appeared in all levels of Court, including in the Supreme Court of Canada. Presently, Lisa is an associate professor at the University of Calgary in the Faculty of Law, where she teaches criminal law and evidence and is the course director for the 3L Advocacy program. She writes about and researches an extensive range of topics including sentencing, judicial decision making and the admissibility of expert and digital evidence. She is the author of the forthcoming Criminal Law Defences, 5th Edition with Pat Knoll, QC. Lisa maintains her own award-winning law blog at www.ideablawg.ca and regularly contributes to the Faculty’s ABlawg website. She was awarded the Faculty of Law’s Howard Tidswell Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence in 2016–2017. Her educational interests go beyond the classroom through her involvement in judicial education. Lisa sits on many committees and is currently on the Board of Calgary Legal Guidance.