I. Glenn Cohen, James A. Attwood and Leslie Williams Professor of Law, Deputy Dean at Harvard Law, and Faculty Director of the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology & Bioethics, teaches courses on health law and civil procedure. As Deputy Dean, Professor Cohen instituted a new pre-orientation program for law students, Zero-L. This asynchronous, module-based program aims to better prepare students to step on campus. First designed for Harvard students and launched in 2019, the course has now reached over 20,000 students at over 120 law schools around the country and a few from abroad. Some of the materials in the course are also available for general audiences for free through HarvardX as “Introduction to American Civics: Presented by Zero-L."
Zero-L: Reimagining pre-orientation to prepare students for Day One success
The benefits
Zero-L was designed to provide students with a set of materials that would flatten the, often very steep, learning curve they face during the first year of law school. In designing the course, the goal was to identify common stumbling blocks and give students a practical introduction for how to be a law student. In doing so, Zero-L aims to reduce student anxiety and provide all students with a level of understanding that will help them thrive on Day One. Students learn how to read cases and statutes along with basic, foundational knowledge about the court system, canons of statutory interpretation, the legal profession, and legal theory. It is not meant to be a crash course in everything students will learn at law school or to “steal the thunder” from professors of first-year courses. Rather, Zero-L aims to give students a shared baseline vocabulary and introductory skills that are relevant to students with a wide range of prior legal knowledge. On average, it takes students 12-14 hours to watch the videos and complete the comprehension checks.
“Zero-L is a bridge from the day students applied and were admitted to Harvard Law School to when they arrive for the first day of class. What are our goals for that period? How can we meet those goals? What do they need to transition into this extremely intense experience that is law school?”
The challenges
Determining what students need and narrowing the scope was the most difficult part of Zero-L’s development. Through focus groups with students and faculty, Cohen and his team worked to design a program that wasn’t too content-rich or onerous, but that still met the needs these groups outlined and felt worthwhile to enrolled students. It was also important to capture the diversity of viewpoints and the rich exchange of ideas that are the hallmark of legal education.
Takeaways and best practices
- Be deliberate. The transition to graduate school is a busy and stressful time for students, and you don’t want to burn students out or create extra anxiety before the academic year starts. Instructors should be deliberate about their goals for pre-orientation courses and how to best achieve those aims, while keeping those aims at the center of all curriculum and design choices.
- Be flexible and creative about assessment. While it may not be possible for an instructor to provide individualized feedback for online pre-orientation modules, it is important to incorporate feedback mechanisms throughout the course. Since Zero-L aims to build skills, students self-assess their work against samples and have frequent multiple-choice quizzes. These quizzes provide real-time feedback, while the self-assessment pushes students to see the strengths and weaknesses in their work without the pressure of external evaluation.
- Be realistic. In designing pre-orientation programming, instructors should be realistic about how much material can and should be covered; the workload, timeline, and costs for development; and the types of features that can be accommodated.
Bottom line
With conscientious and intentional planning and design, pre-orientation courses have great potential for helping students start graduate school on the right foot.