Melissa Marlow
Clinical Professor of Law
Southern Illinois University School of Law
For those of you with young children, you may recognize this title from the popular kid’s show Wonder Pets where, before embarking on an adventure to rescue a pet in trouble, the team chants the familiar song (“What’s gonna work? Teamwork!”) over and over. But teamwork isn’t limited to Wonder Pets and Paw Patrol; it can be exceedingly effective in legal education as well. My entire career in legal education has been spent teaching in the team-based programs of legal writing and academic support. A regular refrain from colleagues around the country is that teams do not function well. This is not a problem unique to a particular school or specific directors; rather, I think it demonstrates the reality that working on a team is not always easy. But teamwork is always a worthwhile pursuit for our students, and ourselves as academics. Successful academic support and writing programs are often those that, regardless of program model, function as a team. This essay sets out some observations on how to work well in teams, based on more than twenty years of experience with team teaching.