The past three weeks I’ve been teaching in our summer pre-session, which requires us to meet for several hours every day to reach our three credit hours. This was my first time teaching in the summer three-week pre-session and teaching my Public Speaking for Lawyers course. I’ve coached moot court or speaking teams and people, sure, but a daily three credit hour course is a whole other thing. I prepped it meticulously, but I’ve taught enough other things to know that you never really know how it’ll land or work out in the classroom.
Of course, there are things I will change about the class, but in totality this was a remarkable three weeks and a meaningful teaching experience. Given our daily meetings and the interactive course design, this felt almost like a summer camp experience. All these different people, with different goals, different opinions, and definitely different speaking styles seemed to learn to trust each other. And trust is not an easy thing in a law school classroom – we grade on curves and the competition is baked into the institution. I can’t honestly say if that trust will transcend this course, but even having for these few weeks was a powerful classroom experience.
The truth is, regardless of what area of law one works in, lawyers are often called upon to also be performers, storytellers, teachers, and oral advocates. Whether it’s in the court room, the board room, to training sessions, or in classrooms, public speaking is often part of the job. To build up our adaptability and preparedness for these demands we used a variety of exercises. We did daily improv and public speaking games, recited poems, taught each other skills in short informational speeches, performed speech analyses, completed breathing exercises, used famous speeches and performed them in our own styles, played with microphones, practiced telling mini-stories in the interviewing context, and in total the students got in front of each other over 20 times in just 14 days. The class had two primary assessments, a Continuing Legal Education presentation and a Storytelling experience. All of these were so thoughtfully performed and I saw growth in every single person in the class. Talk about exposure therapy.
This made me so happy, because frankly, I love public speaking and I love being told a good story! I love speaking and storytelling so much that I understand it’s a learned skill you can develop and not some natural gift from the universe. In 2015 I challenged myself to do a public speaking event every month, and I kept that up for over five years. I continue to frequently find opportunities to lead groups and speak on things I care about.
In my journey I have presented to tiny community groups of just 4-5 people, keynoted a NASA space grant conference, gave a law lecture at an official CBS Star Trek Convention, presented virtually at SXSW during COVID, visited classrooms and conferences across the country, taught over 25 Continuing Legal Education sessions, did an Ignite talk for hundreds of Lincolnites, and gave my (first?) TedX talk in fall 2023, receiving over 18,000 views on YouTube within the first week of posting (18K is small potatoes in influencer terms, I know, but I’m proud of those spuds).
Like anything else, speaking in front of others gets easier the more you do it – so I made them do it a lot. I used a variety of substantive contexts (poems to statutes) and environmental contexts (CLE with a Power Point to a story in a theater-like setting). I hoped that my background and experience as a coach would work, and I think largely it did. What a lovely relief!
Today, on our last day, the students asked to do a breakfast potluck. It was delicious, obviously, but also is evidence of the small community we built together in these three weeks. As I start my least favorite part, deciding on final grades, I hope to bring that vibe on into future iterations of the course.
I’m feeling so grateful to this group of law students, who went “all-in” and signed up for this wild three week ride. They were brave, and it worked!
Elsbeth Magilton 