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Evaluation

Frequent evaluation and assessment facilitates ongoing success for your Street Law program. This section provides suggestions and tools for evaluating the performance of participating law students and assessing the effectiveness of your program.

Evaluating Law Students
Evaluating Your Program

Evaluating Law Students

All programs should have a way to evaluate the law students. The evaluation should identify both what the law students are doing well and what they need to improve upon.

Self-evaluation

Having law students evaluate themselves is a common approach.

Program Coordinator Observation

Most supervised programs have one or two observations per semester of the law students teaching at the site.

Rubric for evaluation of law student teaching skills (developed by Prof. Marilyn Cover, Lewis & Clark Law School)

Feedback from the On-site Teacher/Site Coordinator

Written and oral feedback from the on-site teacher provides insight into the performance of the law students. One Street Law program requires the on-site teacher to submit a critique to the director for each class taught, while others have an end-of-year assessment. Some programs receive feedback from the high school students.

Grades

There are a couple of ways to approach grading law students who participate in a credit-bearing Street Law program.

Some law schools divide students’ grades into areas, such as teaching in the classroom, lesson plans, and seminar. Individual tasks fall within each area and vary by program.
- Grading point system (developed by Margaret Fisher, Distinguished Practitioner in Residence, Seattle University School of Law, & Prof. Julia Gold, University of Washington School of Law)
Other law schools use a pass/fail process of grading. However, some program coordinators report that the lack of grades can reduce the law students’ commitment level.

Evaluating Your Street Law Program

There are many ways to evaluate program successes, mark progress, and identify challenges.

This section provides program coordinators with ways to measure progress toward program outcomes. It provides a variety of options for assessing your program, including techniques that don’t require a lot of time, effort, or money. Even just identifying and prioritizing your program outcomes will help you critically review your program, improve it, and make smart decisions in the future.

If you are interested in pursuing a more in-depth program evaluation, know that it can be expensive and time consuming and require outside expertise. We recommend involving your university’s education department to discuss an evaluation of your program as a possible graduate student project or to get assistance in developing different components.

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