Students in Fordham Law’s Advance Seminar in Public Interest Lawyering class were joined on Feb. 6 by unfamiliar faces: Graduate School of Education (GSE) students in counseling and psychology.
The GSE students were on hand to help their Lincoln Center campus peers interpret their results of Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) self-scorable personality assessments, which the law students had taken the week before.
The personality assessment is used to help people better understand which aspects of 16 distinctive personality types describes them best—knowledge which can improve any group interactions. The law students have organized themselves into six teams and each group works collaboratively throughout the semester on a project with an outside public interest legal organization on issues such as the school-to-prison pipeline, student debt, homeless youth, and refugees. The seminar, the capstone academic requirement of the Stein Scholars Program, is team-taught by Fordham Law Professor Bruce Green, the Louis Stein Chair, and Sherri Levine, associate director of the Law School’s Stein Center for Law and Ethics.
Levine said the public lawyering class requires more problem solving, project management, and collaboration than most law classes. So five years ago, Green and Levine asked Margo Jackson, Ph.D., professor of counseling psychology in the GSE’s Division of Psychological and Educational Services, if she’d be willing to visit their law class to help students develop their collaborative team-building skills.
