Professionalism Programs
Cooley Student Mediation Board
Cooley students trained in mediation under the Michigan Court Rules volunteer their time to help confidentially resolve personal conflicts between students and practice their mediation skills.
In 2007, the Board handled a number of disputes between students and, in some cases, Mediation Board members were able to get the parties to agree to a settlement that satisfied both parties. The students would say that the biggest challenge is getting students to agree to participate. The biggest benefit is the opportunity to practice, with real people on real cases, the mediation skills they have learned in class and through training.
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Cultural Competence Workshops
A series of five workshops supporting professional development in cross-cultural competencies are offered to Cooley students to expose them to, and teach them to advise and counsel, a diverse clientele in a sensitive, supportive, and effective manner. The Center's workshops feature speakers, interactive instruction, and student-facilitated workgroups covering five core competencies: (1) communication; (2) cognition; (3) reference; (4) resource; and (5) relationship. Students learn to recognize their own professionally influenced and their clients' culturally influenced habits, viewpoints, capacities, and practices so as to be able to adjust and adapt and thereby provide more professional counsel.
The Center for Ethics, Service, and Professionalism sponsored a workbook and series of five workshops at the law school in June, July, September, October, and November 2007, to help law students develop the intercultural skills necessary to serve diverse populations. The workbook drew on multicultural research to offer a framework within which students can develop the personal self-awareness, the knowledge of others, and the professional skills to interact in a sensitive, supportive, and effective manner with diverse individuals. The workshops offered speakers from the Cooley faculty and from outside the law school on issues of adapting to the multicultural settings in which legal services are needed and the intercultural skills necessary to that effective service. Cultural competence is a hallmark of professionalism. Many students and several faculty members attended. The series was well-received and led to an article, handout, and presentation for Cooley’s 2007 Law Review Symposium on Cultural Competence as a Lawyer Skill.
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Enforcing Student Conduct Codes
Students engaging in unethical or unprofessional conduct are investigated, counseled, and sanctioned, as appropriate. Along with faculty, Cooley students also serve as counselors, prosecutors, and judges in Honor Code cases.
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Institute for Principled Administration in Higher Education
This Institute offers workshops and consulting services to undergraduate schools in how to implement principled administration—operating the school in accordance with the school’s stated mission and values.
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Integrity in Our Communities Speaker Series
The Center brings nationally and locally recognized speakers to each campus each term to talk with our students, staff, and faculty about issues, trials, and lawsuits touching on ethical and professionalism matters. Past speakers include a nationally-recognized criminal defense attorney, a former U.S. Attorney, a former State Bar of Michigan President, a U.S. District Court judge, and Chief Judge of the Michigan Court of Appeals.
At the Lansing campus, the Center for Ethics, Service, and Professionalism brought Reginald Turner, former President of the State Bar of Michigan, member of the State Board of Education, and partner and executive committee member in the Clark Hill law firm, to speak on "Breathing Life into the Lawyer’s Oath"; Judge William C. Whitbeck, Chief Judge of the Michigan Court of Appeals, spoke on “The Judicial Code of Conduct and the Rules of Professional Conduct: Avoiding Even the Appearance of Impropriety”; and Michael Burke, a disbarred Michigan attorney, gave a speech entitled “Never Enough—Addiction Minefields: How Addictions Changed My Life”.
At the Oakland County campus, Saul A. Green, former United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan appointed by former President William J. Clinton from 1994 to 2001, former Wayne County Corporation Counsel, former Chief Counsel, United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, and senior counsel and member of Miller Canfield's Criminal Defense Group and Litigation and Dispute Resolution Practice Group, spoke on “Infallibility and the Criminal Justice System”; E. Christopher Johnson, Jr., General Motors North America vice president and general counsel, gave a speech entitled “Service: A Crucial Element to a Successful Legal Career”; and Denise Page Hood, United States District Judge for the Eastern District of Michigan, spoke on “Integrity in Our Communities.”
In Grand Rapids, the Center hosted Nancy L. Haynes, executive director of the Fair Housing Center of Greater Grand Rapids, who spoke about “Finding Your Professional Identity”; Jon Muth, former State Bar of Michigan President, General Counsel for Miller Johnson, and founder of the Kent County Legal Assistance Center, who gave a speech entitled “Access to Legal Representation for Underserved Populations”; and Michael Burke, a disbarred Michigan attorney, gave a speech entitled “Never Enough—Addiction Minefields: How Addictions Changed My Life”.
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Professional Development and Mentoring
The Center for Ethics, Service, and Professionalism promotes professional development not just of its students, but also its faculty and staff. Professional development efforts sponsored through the Center include development of a faculty professionalism portfolio, conferences with area faculty, mentoring opportunities for Cooley faculty, and a mentoring pilot program run in conjunction with the State Bar of Michigan that matches Cooley students intending to practice in Michigan with Michigan lawyers.
This new initiative was added to the Center’s programs in 2007. The Center for Ethics, Service, and Professionalism sponsored a professional development event and workshop at Cooley’s Grand Rapids initiated, developed, and overseen by Nelson Miller. The workshop, called the Grand Rapids Area Graduate Education Conference, offered speakers on interdisciplinary collaboration among graduate educators. The workshop’s purpose was to stimulate faculty investigation into teaching and learning as professional skills. Contact and interest-area information was gathered from the participants, summarized, and distributed among the participants to promote future collaboration. Approximately 42 faculty members and deans from six graduate institutions attended.
In 2007 we successfully launched a pilot mentoring program through a collaboration with the State Bar of Michigan that will establish mentoring relationships between Cooley Lansing portfolio students and Michigan lawyers, the hope being that the mentoring relationship may continue after graduation and into practice, as desired and recommended by the Chief Justices Commission of the ABA. This effort, led by Amy Timmer, will be studied so that the lessons learned can be shared with other states and the national Conference of Bar Presidents, which is particularly interested in finding an effective lawyer mentoring model.
Martha Moore is working with the Straker Bar Association to establish a mentoring program for Cooley’s Auburn Hills African American students. Students are assigned to African-American lawyers in Oakland County who will mentor them in specific areas of practice and bar exam preparation.
Nelson Miller developed a faculty professionalism portfolio. Nelson has been using the portfolio since working on the student professionalism portfolio early last year. The portfolio is designed to provide the professor with a working format within which to state a vision consistent with the school mission, establish goals and objectives, plan for the achievement of those goals, self-assess progress toward those goals, and demonstrate that progress to others. An example electronic faculty professional development portfolio is available from which all teaching evaluations, writings, presentations, and other materials can be instantly accessed.
Amy Timmer and Heather Spielmaker also invited the Cooley law student fraternity, Phi Delta Phi, to partner with the Center for Ethics to coordinate student giving, leadership, and professional development activity, and to encourage student involvement in both the fraternity and the Center.
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Professionalism Portfolio
Every student at Cooley is offered the opportunity to create, throughout enrollment, a Professionalism Portfolio that requires self-reflection and training in personal responsibility, ethics, and service, documents the student’s professional development and personal code of conduct, and offers employers insight into an applicant’s knowledge, skills, ethics, and character.
Hilary 2007 marked the launch of the portfolio project, which is overseen at all three campuses by Heather Spielmaker. Starting with a pilot of 56 Lansing students hand-matched to eight Lansing faculty advisors, this pilot group has maintained approximately 50% participation. The group has benefited from and responded well to special presentations from different Cooley departments for three terms now, and the academic attrition rate for this group was 75% lower than the attrition rate for the general Cooley student body after the first term.
In the Trinity term of 2007, nearly 150 students participated in the portfolio project from all three campuses. The attrition rate among these students after one term of law school was less than half that of the general student body. This group is harder to meet with as it is composed of evening and weekend students who often have full time jobs. This has led us to ask whether it might be more prudent to offer the portfolio as a self-directed Portal-based program only for these students rather than trying to get them to commit to group meetings.
In the Michaelmas term of 2007, Cooley had an extremely large in-coming class. Over 450 students signed up for the portfolio project, which now has 22 volunteer faculty advisors in Lansing and participation from all branch campus advisors (except one faculty member in Grand Rapids).
From the pilot and the continuing program, we learned that this is a worthwhile project that helps students connect to the school, make meaningful career choices, learn to reflect and consider their behaviors and desires, and develop into professionals. We added a number of skills exercises offered by Chris Church, who drafted Cooley’s Skills Report. Near the end of 2007, Cooley’s Curriculum Committee approved a pilot, six-term, two-credit course that tracks the Portfolio to involve 50 Lansing students and scheduled to begin in Hilary 2008.
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Project on Ethics and Professionalism in Dispute Resolution
It is the mission of the Project for Ethics and Professionalism in Dispute Resolution at the Thomas M. Cooley Law School to prepare ourselves, our law students, and the bar to serve our clients and our communities as collaborative problem-solvers. This mission is born from our personal and institution-wide commitment to ethical and professional law practice.
In 2007, Dale Iverson undertook numerous activities to work concepts of collaboration into legal practice. Through the Center’s Project on Ethics and Professionalism in Dispute Resolution, she:
- Offered workshops for community (volunteer) mediators on ethics in mediation and on special considerations in employment and discrimination mediation. Dale has also facilitated discussion groups for the Cultural Competency Workshops.
- Participated in various local and state-wide leadership roles related to ethics and professionalism in Alternative Dispute Resolution including service on the Mediator Quality Assurance Committee for the West Michigan Dispute Resolution Center for the past year, and service on the Executive Committee of the ADR Section of the Grand Rapids Bar Association.
- Offered pro bono mediated in state and federal courts and at local community dispute resolution centers in community matters as well as government agency-connected matters including the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, the United States Post Office, and the Federal Aviation Administration, and involved student observers in mediations where permitted.
- Trained student facilitators for a community event celebrating the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and assessing unmet legal assistance needs in the Grand Rapids area, and together with students facilitated breakout groups; she also organized and trained student facilitators for workshops on cultural competence in client counseling.
- Helped identify “gaps” in the availability of mediation to pro se litigants in court ADR programs, and provided pro bono mediation on an on-going basis to help address needs there.
- Successfully launched a collaboration between the Equal Access Initiative of the State Bar of Michigan and the ADR Section of the State Bar. With approval gained from both and funding awarded by the State Bar in 2007, the project will be co-facilitated by Project faculty, and stakeholders will be gathered from around the state to identify and address issues of diversity in ADR.
- Obtained advanced training in mediating in complex and specialized areas including federal court-connected matters, restorative justice programs in high schools to address truancy and expulsion, and disputes among parents and schools about the needs and programs for special education students.
- Spoke at the Grand Rapids Bar Association’s New Lawyer Orientation held at Cooley, on behalf of the Dispute Resolution Center of West Michigan on a panel intended to inform new lawyers about community and professional resources available to them.
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Public School Mentoring and Assistance Programs
In the Pontiac public schools, the Center offers character based educational programs; at Pontiac Northern High School, Center faculty and Cooley students promote ethics and professionalism and mentor students through the Success on Saturdays program, and serve as academic tutors, teacher aides, and coaching assistants for Pontiac Northern's sports teams and cheer teams. The Center also coordinates the Collaborative for a Certainty of Opportunity, which brings corporate partners to Pontiac schools to offer educational and career opportunities to Pontiac school students.
In an effort to reduce school violence in the Lansing public schools, the Center offers the Peer Mediation Program through which Cooley students teach mediation and conflict resolution, and act as mentors, to public school students. That project is slated to operate in Flint’s Northwestern Academy in 2008. The Center is also involved in mentoring Lansing school children through the Art of Leadership project.
In Muskegon, the Center’s Nelson Miller sits as Board President of and offers consultation to the Tri-Valley Academy, a public charter school academy.
Highlights from 2007 include exponential growth in support of Pontiac residents, and an expansion of the Peer Mediation program to a second Lansing high school and a first Flint high school.
Pontiac Schools
The Center for Ethics, Service, and Professionalism Auburn Hills faculty members have developed a close and supportive relationship with the Pontiac public school system, and have an especially close relationship with Pontiac Northern. Joan Vestrand founded and operates the Success On Saturdays (SOS) program at Pontiac Northern High School, offered every other Saturday from September through December and January to June. In 2007, programs included:
- A field trip to the Detroit Science Center.
- Hip hop line dancing with members of the Wayne County Circuit Court bench.
- Mock trial competition led by the Detroit Metropolitan Bar Association, Barristers Division.
- Two field trips to Cooley to sit in on a law school class and meet with judges and lawyers to talk about college and graduate school.
- Numerous programs featuring local judges on issues such as Choices and Consequences, Focus and Perseverance.
- A program on substance abuse prevention and education;
- A program on Skills and Strategies for a Successful Presentation presented by Central Michigan University.
- Tutoring and ACT preparation.
- A program on overcoming prejudice featuring the film “The Freedom Writers Diary.” Each participant received a copy of the novel on which the movie is based and a personal journal to chronicle their own thoughts and experiences. The novel will serve as the launch of SOS’s new book club.
Significant outgrowths from this program in 2007 included:
- Establishment of the “Collaborative For A Certainty of Opportunity For All The Children of Pontiac”, a group that includes Cooley Law School, Oakland Circuit Court Judge Fred Mester, the Pontiac Alumni Foundation, General Motors, the Oakland County Bar, Wayne State Law School, the Pontiac Schools, and other Pontiac community leaders, and is focused on assisting the Pontiac schools.
- Cooley’s participation in a Roundtable on the Pontiac Schools sponsored by the Oakland Press Newspaper. The Roundtable membership, by invitation only, included, in addition to Cooley, Pontiac school teachers and administrators, the Mayor of Pontiac, Oakland University, Baker College, and other civic leaders in the community, including local pastors and a state representative.
- Cooley students raised over $1,100 for a merit scholarship in memory of Jonathan Patterson, a Pontiac Northern senior active in SOS who died suddenly in March of a heart attack.
- An outstanding Pontiac Northern student was introduced to Chris Johnson, Vice President and General Counsel for GM North America. Chris will be the student’s personal mentor through college and graduate school and gave the student a summer externship at the GM Legal Department, which will continue through college.
- Fixing up the school: About a dozen Cooley students and professors helped clean and decorate Pontiac Northern High School to ready the building for the new school year. The Cooley Auburn Hills ABA/LSD is secretly working on an “extreme makeover” of Pontiac Northern’s teacher’s lounge in honor of the hardworking and devoted teachers there. New furniture and painted murals are envisioned to help provide a serene and calming break room.
- Cooley students, supervised by Professor Dan Matthews, served as volunteer tax return preparers, preparing tax returns for indigent Pontiac families over the course of several weeks in early 2007.
- Two Cooley students, two Cooley deans, and three Cooley professors attended Pontiac Northern’s 2007 graduation, in cap and gown, and Cooley participated in the ceremony.
- Joan presented on Character and Personal Success to incoming 9th graders and the 10th grade class at Academy camps held during the summer.
- Cooley professors and students have assisted in the classroom at Pontiac Northern High School in the fall semester 2007 serving either as teachers’ aides, academic tutors, or presenters. Several Cooley students and professors participate in Pontiac Northern’s After School Tutor Program, volunteering as academic tutors on weekdays.
- Several Cooley students and professors marched along side Pontiac Northern students in their 2007 Homecoming Parade through the City of Pontiac.
In addition, in 2007, Cooley faculty and students:
- raised enough funds to purchase a new laptop computer for Pontiac Northern,
- donated 36 new smoke detectors to needy families in Pontiac,
- donated 80 gently used prom dresses to Pontiac Northern,
- donated funds, clothing, and cleaning supplies to local Pontiac shelters,
- provided car loads of donations to a 17-year-old Pontiac Northern student who has the sole custody and care of four younger siblings, including food, money, gift cards, furniture, clothing, winter coats, toys, books and cleaning supplies (the family is featured on the cover of this report),
- and collected over 4500 new and gently used children’s books which were given away, free, to the children of Pontiac at a community fair in August.
Martha Moore operates a Character Education program at Will Rogers Elementary School in Auburn Hills, part of Pontiac school system. Cooley students make presentations on beneficial character traits that the elementary students will want to develop, such as manners and honesty, and those they want to discourage and learn to deal with, such as bullying. The presentations have been offered every other month of the school year. About 20 Cooley students have participated in the program.
Will Rogers has a high Hispanic population, but none of the people working in the office speaks Spanish. Last year, Martha arranged for a Cooley student to volunteer in the office to translate for frustrated parents and administrators. Martha has identified another student this term who has volunteered to act in this capacity.
Lansing Schools
For years, Nancy Wonch has operated the Lansing School District Peer Mediation Program, which she developed in an effort to stem violence in Lansing schools. Through this program, Nancy trains Cooley law students in mediation and conflict resolution and those Cooley students then train Lansing school children in the same skills. The Cooley students also act as mentors to the Lansing school children they train.
- This year Nancy trained 23 Cooley students and together they trained 45 Lansing Eastern High School students in facilitative mediation and negotiation skills.
- Eastern peer mediators have mediated over 100 cases for students in their school and they have a success rate that approaches 80%. They are also trusted enough by faculty at Eastern to mediate disputes between students and faculty which is very unusual and demonstrates the strength of the program at Eastern.
- Cooley students are scheduled to train Post Oak and Wexford Elementary students to be peer mediators in their school.
- Peer mediation training for Sexton High School students is scheduled to begin in 2008.
- Flint’s Northwestern Preparatory Academy would like Cooley to join in a partnership with the Flint Public Schools, the Mott Foundation, and Central Michigan University to teach peer mediation to students at Northwestern.
- Lansing's Eastern High School offered conflict resolution skills training at Jefferson Middle School in Pontiac.
Heather Spielmaker is involved in helping Lansing’s Pattengill Middle School students through the Art of Leadership program, and works with a small group of students to brainstorm community service project ideas. Art of Leadership is a Cooley-supported organization that strives to teach leadership skills to young people. In 2007, Heather continued as a mentor and participated in the Art of Leadership end-of-year service project. Heather also agreed to become the lead coach for the new Lansing high school adaptation of the leadership mentoring program that has been successful at Pattengill.
Muskegon Public Charter School
Nelson Miller continued his work with the Tri-Valley Academy of Arts and Academics, which finally obtained its reauthorization by Grand Valley State University based on substantially improved test scores over the past year. With Nelson as board president, in 2006-07 the academy changed management companies, school principal, curriculum, mission, school improvement plan, educational objectives, and three-fourths of the staff to finally achieve nearly across-the-board improved test scores for the first time in ten years. The school succeeded in substantially improving its test scores, achieved re-authorization from Grand Valley State University, avoided the failing school label, and substantially improved its school climate including office referrals and discipline. It also restructured its lease to ensure its future financial integrity, engaging its new management company long term, and retaining a new school leader. Plans are ongoing to restructure school building finances for long-term stability. The inner-city school is now interested in peer mediation training, which will be explored in 2008.
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