We are excited to give you a sneak preview of the upcoming joint conference between NASJE and the American Judges Association (AJA) to be held in Seattle, Washington, October 4-7th, 2015, at the Sheraton Seattle Hotel. The Annual Conference Committee is working closely with judges from the AJA and Washington State to provide a program will be filled with educational session that both judges and judicial branch educators will enjoy.
The conference line-up includes sessions on civic education; judge driven curriculum development; resilience strategies for court professionals; designing leadership programs for court staff; educating a multi-generational workforce; international educational opportunities; and an interactive panel discussing ethical and other dilemmas judges and court educators face. Conference participants will also experience a showcase of dynamic educational programs from around the country that they can take back to their home states.
NASJE will also launch their latest curriculum on Diversity, Fairness, and Access, coinciding with the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Senior Staff Attorney from the California AOC’s Center for Judicial Education & Research, Linda McCulloh, will speak on the responsibilities of the courts under the ADA.
Traditionally, NASJE sponsors an optional session that provides an opportunity to view a cutting-edge movie with a facilitated discussion. This year, judges and educators will view “The House We Live In” with moderator and producer David Kuhn from Charlotte Street Films. Three judges from Washington State will facilitate a discussion about the movie and its impact. Each participant will receive the movie CD.
As our planning progresses, the Annual Conference Committee is developing an off-site experiential learning experience and hopes to bring the conference to a grand finale with a nationally recognized speaker and author.
Set your calendars to join us in Seattle for an educational conference that will re-ignite, equip and re-energize!
HOTEL RESERVATIONS
The Conference hotel is the Seattle Sheraton. The cut-off date for the NASJE rate at the Sheraton is September 18.
SCHEDULE OVERVIEW OF NASJE AND AJA SESSIONS
All educational sessions sponsored by both NASJE and AJA. As a conference attendee, you are invited to attend any of these sessions. Please note there is a joint AJA-NASJE opening educational plenary session at 2:30-4:00 pm on The New Jim Crow: Impact of Incarceration on the Courts.
Dopamine Lollipops: Dr. John Medina’s Brain Rules! By Kelly Tait
Dr. Medina wants to make you laugh. And think about food. And sex.
In his high-energy closing plenary session at NASJE’s 2015 annual conference, Dr. Medina did a terrific job of informing and involving attendees. He vividly demonstrated how to apply research on learning and memory to judicial branch education. The “brain rules” he shared are worth revisiting, so this article will touch back on them and direct you where to go for more.
Dr. Medina is a developmental molecular biologist who, as he says, has a lifetime’s fascination with the mind, in particular how it reacts to and organizes information. He is the author of the New York
Times bestseller Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School, and he is an affiliate Professor of Bioengineering at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
It’s easy to see why he has been awarded numerous teaching awards. Dr. Medina has a compelling ability to make brain science understandable and to highlight the relevance of concepts to his specific audience.
In his session, Dr. Medina said that there’s a lot we don’t know about the brain and how it works, but there are also some things we do know that can help educators turn on the light bulbs of learning. First we have to understand that our attention is like a vintage spotlight; we need to know how to control our learners’ spotlights.
The lessons Dr. Medina taught us about characteristics of our attentional spotlight started with the need to “chunk” information by putting it into digestible amounts since there is a limit on how much we can take in at one time. Ten minutes is the amount of time you have before you need to do something different or you risk losing your learners’ attention.
Another lesson is that the human brain ALWAYS processes meaning before it processes detail. To help our learners’ brains make meaning, Dr. Medina said that instructors need to address one of these six questions out loud every ten minutes: –Will it eat me? –Can I eat it? –Can I have sex with it? –Will it have sex with me? –Have I seen it before? –Have I never seen it before? Our brains are pattern matchers, trying to make sense of the world, and evolution has dictated that these questions are fundamental to our attention and our meaning-making.
He said when we get one of these questions addressed, our brains get a “dopamine lollipop” – a shot of dopamine, the powerful neurotransmitter that helps control the brain’s reward and pleasure centers. We need to get and keep learners’ attention this way so we can move important information through the phases of memory.
Dr. Medina explained what the research on memory means for designing courses. Again, the field is defined as much by what isn’t known as by what is. We do know some things about declarative memory, which is sometimes called explicit memory or “knowing what” – it is memory of facts and events that can be consciously recalled (or “declared”). According to Dr. Medina, the human brain on average can hold seven pieces of information for 30 seconds in our immediate memory buffer. If you don’t do something with it within 30 seconds (repeat it or apply it) then the brain will dump it.
In the next stage, working memory can hold information for up to120 minutes, but if it’s not repeated or otherwise used or reinforced within those two hours, learners will lose it. If instructors build in ways both to hit the 30 second mark and the 120 minute mark, then the information moves to long-term memory. The bad news is that it takes about ten years before a memory is fully consolidated, meaning it is infinitely retrievable and not subject to corruption.
Dr. Medina also briefly discussed episodic memory—which relates to personal experiences and specific events or “episodes”—which follows different rules. We only need to get this kind of knowledge once to make it stick, but it’s much more subject to change and can be corrupted. As participants in the session learned, one takeaway on the subject of memory was just how complex the topic is and how much we still have to learn. According to Dr. Medina, “Human memory is just controlled forgetting.”
Another takeaway on learning and memory was his advice to think about knowledge the way we think about booster shots – we need it more than once to get its full effect and to maintain it. He cited the work of Dr. Alan Baddeley, a British psychologist who conducted a landmark study in 1975 called “The Capacity of Short Term Memory” and who continues to do work in the field. For more on Dr. Baddeley’s research, see https://www.york.ac.uk/psychology/research/.
While Dr. Medina gave—and reinforced—some excellent information directly relevant to our profession, there’s much more where that came from. Dr. Medina’s website has information, references, and videos highlighting the concepts he discussed and lots in addition to that at http://www.brainrules.net/. His book is available there as well as at Amazon.com.
Dr. Medina’s presentation was quite a ride—as fun and memorable as it was relevant. Applying his Brain Rules to our judicial education classrooms will make for better learning.
About the Author
Kelly Tait is an adjunct professor in Communication Studies at the University Nevada’s School of Social Research and Justice Studies. She has been a communication consultant in judicial branch education for 14 years and is Immediate Past President of NASJE.
The New Jim Crow: The Impact of Mass Incarceration on the Courts
Article by Nancy Fahey Smith, Field Trainer at the Superior Court of Arizona in Pima County
With just 5% of the world’s population, the United States has 25% of the world’s prisoners (NOTE 1).
Incarceration rates have risen 500% in the last 40 years.
The United States currently incarcerates 2.3 million people, 40% of whom are African-American males. African-Americans make up just 13.2% of the U.S. population (NOTE 2).
Presenter Nicole Austin-Hillery made these statements and many more to an audience of several hundred judges and judicial educators in her session titled The New Jim Crow: The Impact of Mass Incarceration on the Courts at the 2015 Annual NASJE Conference in Seattle, held in conjunction with the American Judges Association conference. Austin-Hillery, who works at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, spoke passionately about the effect of mass incarceration on the African-American population, but also about the cost to society as a whole in terms of lost productivity, cultural bias, and dollars and cents. For example, according to Ms. Austin-Hillery, governments in the United States spend $80 billion a year to run jails and prisons (NOTE 3).
People who have been incarcerated have difficulty finding jobs and housing due to their conviction, which limits their productivity for the economy as a whole as well as for them and their families. Incarcerating people increases the chances of recidivism, which in turn increases costs. Often, convicted felons lose the right to vote.
While the African-American community is the most adversely affected, every American is negatively impacted by mass incarceration.
In addition, while incarceration has increased exponentially, crime rates, including for violent crime, are down.
Ms. Austin-Hillery did not hesitate to encourage audience members to stop being part of the problem, and instead to be part of the solution. She noted the increase in the 1970’s of statutes which promoted increased jail terms, both in number and length. The Federal sentencing guidelines enacted by Congress in 1984 and Bill Clinton’s crime bill of 1994 have exacerbated the problem. Ms. Austin-Hillery believes that judges have become accustomed to harsher sentences and don’t question often enough the disparate impact they have on African-Americans.
But, progress has begun in this area. According to Austin-Hillery, in 2015 members of Congress introduced bills that propose changes in the scope for drug sentences and that reduce mandatory minimums while giving judges more discretion in sentencing. Both houses of Congress agree in principle that something needs to be done. But, according to Ms. Austin-Hillery, much can be done in the meantime by judges to begin to alleviate the problem. Ms. Austin-Hillery suggested several tactics judges can take to reduce mass incarceration. They include:
- Speaking up and speaking out against unjust and unnecessary laws;
- Providing ideas for changing the system;
- Being honest about racial disparity and implicit bias in the system and in their courtrooms;
- And exercising what discretion they have at their disposal, i.e. in bail and sentencing to reduce the impact of laws and of implicit bias (NOTE 4).
You can find the book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander at many major outlets and at your public library. Also of great use to educators is the website for the Brennan Center for Justice.
NOTES
1. Chettia, Inimai and Michael Waldman, editors, Solutions. American Leaders Speak Out on Criminal Justice, Brennan Center for Justice, 2015. http://www.brennancenter.org
2. United States Census Bureau Quick Facts. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/states/00000.html
3. Chettia, Inimai and Michael Waldman, editors, Solutions.
4. Eaglin, Jessica and Danyelle Solomon, Reducing Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Jails: Recommendations for Local Practice, Brennan Center for Justice, 2015. http://www.brennancenter.org
Developing Leadership Programs for Court Personnel: Multifaceted Models in Arizona, Missouri and Ohio
Article by Rob Godfrey (UT)
This session covered different ways that the judicial education departments from three different states have gone about creating leadership programs within their education systems. First, Jeff Schrade, Education Services Division Director for the Arizona Supreme Court Administrative Office of the Courts, asked “Will your succession plan work?” Looking at internal versus external hiring and promoting of employees, he offered some nation-wide facts for consideration.
External hires are 61% more likely to be fired and 21% more likely than internal hires to leave a job on their own accord. They are more likely to get lower marks in performance reviews during their first two years on the job. 66% of senior managers hired from outside usually fail within the first 18 months.
Schrade said that buy-in from the top was critically important and with that in mind, the Arizona Leadership Programs created a diverse court leadership institute using the following tiered competencies:
- Executive +
- Executive
- Manager
- Supervisor
This model allows employees to be inserted at the appropriate level according to where they were at the time.
In the Ohio Supreme Court system, Margaret Allen, Education Program Manager, says they utilize Institute for Court Management (ICM) courses as a basis for curriculum. Arizona also utilizes ICM. Ohio and Arizona focus on organizational management, using six courses total or two per year for three years. They developed an application form that lists desired minimal skills to discern qualified applicants. The forms are reviewed by an ICM committee and certified court executives. The supervisor series consists of nine courses or three per year and focus on management of personnel.
In Missouri, State Court Administrator, Anthony Simones, found early in his tenure that the clerks had low morale, work was substandard, and turnover was high. He felt the first goal was to turn around the clerks’ view of themselves. He relied heavily on the court clerk education committee. The Missouri Court Management Institute developed courses on case processing, leadership skills and professionalism.
Missouri started with small time allotment for classes and added more as demand grew. Clerks can complete their six courses in one year and the number per class is limited to 25. Clerks learn to think like professionals by being challenged to think like professionals. Tactics for classes include simulations and exercises designed to develop leadership skills. In the supervision course, they are constantly asked, “How would you handle this?” In the professionalism course, the mantra is, “What they do in the classroom is what they do in the courtroom.” Simones believes in treating clerks as professionals. He wants to make courses as demanding and interactive as those in other areas.
A Summary Report of the Faculty Development Program
By Philip J. Schopick, CCM | Program Manager, Judicial College | Supreme Court of Ohio
Fewer things are more satisfying than seeing teaching done right. The faculty development program taught at NASJE’s 39th annual conference in Seattle truly fit the bill. The program was taught by then NASJE President Kelly Tait and former NASJE presidents Joseph Sawyer and William Brunson.
This program was both an exercise and example of a great program taught by following tried and true adult learning techniques. To top it off, the presenters pointed out to the judges and judicial educators fortunate enough to be in the room the various ways they’d followed adult education techniques and the various activities they’d used as they taught.
Do you need a faculty development program presented in your state and are not ready to do it yourself? Then any of these three presenters can do the job for you.