Last month, Cal Law noted that Berkeley Law had hired Kristen Holmquist (left) from UCLA’s law school to be its new director of academic support. Holmquist was out of pocket at the time, but we’ve found her and asked about her plans for Boalties and faculty, as well as her views on student success in law school and what she perceives to be her role in the school’s efforts to bump its bar pass rate to its original heights. Below are excerpts from the interview:
Q: Do you have roots in the Bay Area?
A: I went to Cal undergrad (English major). I’ve always had the same thing that other Cal undergrads have — you end up back here.
Q: You’ve worked in academic support at UCLA for five years. What have you learned about student success?
A: I’ve learned that we have a fairly narrow definition of what student success is. Typically we expect that success to come on its own, to already be there, and we don’t see our job as actually teaching it. … [But certain] threshold skills that law school demands are eminently learnable and teachable with enough attention and effort.
Q: Berkeley Law isn’t happy with its recent bar pass rate. The faculty is poring over the data to figure out what’s gone wrong. Where do you see your role in helping the school boost that score?
A: What I do is a long-term thing, I don’t think that I can come in and change the bar pass rate overnight. I do fully intend to work with the 3Ls next year more to gear what they already know toward the bar. … I talk as openly as I know how about all of the skills I think I know it takes to be a good lawyer: effective listening, creative thinking, diligence and hard work, but my job is not to change legal education, but to get students to master the skill that law school actually wants them to master, and that is legal analysis. …
I am completely willing or happy even to sacrifice coverage for depth. One of the things I can do is work with students to develop a mastery of a subject matter. I want them to know con law, for example, in their bones, so that they know what that mastery feels like and then they’re better able to recreate it on their own.
Q: Laurie Zimet, academic support director at Hastings College of the Law, tells me she does a fair amount of pedagogy work with faculty. How much do you plan to work with faculty at Berkeley Law?
A: What I have proposed to them as an idea, and what I’d very much like to do, is to start thinking about teaching colloquia. I think it’d be fun to bring in professors in education, psychology, people who have something to say about pedagogy, so at least there is some place for people to talk about teaching. It would give faculty members an opportunity to talk about their own pedagogy, what works for them, a setting in which these could be shared.
Q: What do you believe makes you good at your job?
A: There are the obvious things, my job is not scholarship, it’s teaching, so I have more time and all of my attention can be on students, rather than on writing. So there’s that. But to the extent that we understand what makes good teachers good teachers — a huge piece of it is believing in their students and I guess I just haven’t met a student who I didn’t think could do it.
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