As I have been writing a lot lately, first-year students all over the country are receiving their grades on their first set of midterms in law school. Many are pleased, and many are disappointed. One of the many oddities of law school grading is that, unlike many masters and doctoral programs, the grades law students get in law school, on average, tend to be lower than their college grades. For many students, they are receiving their first set of grades in their lives that are not mostly As and maybe a few Bs. For a long time, I have been looking for ways to help my students process the shock of their grades and move from disappointment to action to improve.

This week, I noticed that a new McGeorge colleague, Professor Natalia Ramírez Lee (whose office happens to be next door to mine), had implemented an approach to helping her students process their midterms that delighted and impressed me. She distributed paper leaves to her students and asked her students to write (anonymously) what they learned from their midterm in her class; example results appear on the bulletin board outside her office. The students’ lessons on the bulletin board are inspiring. For example, the students reported that they learned that they are smarter and stronger than they realized.

The approach strikes as just plain good teaching. Rather than Professor Ramírez Lee telling her students what they should have learned from her midterm, she is empowering them to teach themselves. Her approach sends a message that she sees her students as capable of understanding and growth, that they are more than mere vessels into which she pours her expertise. I believe that, as a result, her students may be more likely to develop the growth mindset many of us wish our students would adopt.

The exercise also invites students to engage in metacognitive reflection, to think about their thinking on the midterm, a critical facet of expert self-regulated learning. Being an expert at self-regulated learning, in turn, leads to improvement and better learning.

Finally, we would predict that students who have been invited to take ownership over their learning in this way will be more motivated because the autonomy support provided by Professor Ramírez Lee gives students a sense that they have agency, that they are in control of their own learning. People who feel agency feel better, stronger, and more open to learning so they work harder, resulting in a virtuous cycle of sense of agency, working harder, performing better, achieving better results, which, of course, crates an even great sense of agency.

In short, I like the idea.