Director Netta Burke shares her recent research on feedback with colleagues during brown-bag lunch presentation

January 31, 2025

On Thursday, January 30, 2025, Director of the Legal Writing Program, Netta Burke, shared her recent research, “Clearest Point – Muddiest Point: Creating an Effective Feedback Loop for Greater Student Engagement and Heightened Cognition” with the learning community at the law school. Director Burke provided the context that to her, teaching is more than being a grader, she wanted the engagement with students, and she wanted the continuous feedback from students. Therefore, she implemented a tool to allow the students to provide feedback by asking them to voluntarily give her the ‘concept that was clearest’ to them in a lecture and the ‘concept that was the least clear,’ or ‘muddy’ to them in a lecture. What she found is that students enthusiastically participated in this feedback exercise, and she would then take the most common ‘muddiest’ concept and spend 10-15 minutes on it the next lecture period. Next steps in the research include helping students become better at asking their questions, think in more discrete terms, and help them generally with prompts as questions. All of these skills are important for legal research and writing. Dean Dekle was in attendance, and she commented, “Director Burke’s research is very timely, as we want to ensure our students in both our residential and online programs are able to give us feedback on their learning as the semester is progressing, and we are going to take the next steps to help Director Burke develop her research in this area more thoroughly.” The other participants in the audience commented that they would like to try this in their own classes, and wondered if this can ultimately help our students become better learners.