Do You Know Your Type?

Yesterday, we took a brief look at learning styles and MBTI personalities.  At the workshop, students encountered the three major learning styles and were introduced to the 16 different MBTI personality types.

First, students watched a video on thinking fast and thinking slow, which delved into the concepts of the conscious vs. the subconscious mind.  You can watch it here: Brain Tricks – This Is How Your Brain Works.

Students then learned about the three major learning styles: auditory; visual; kinesthetic.  The presentation discussed the differences between them, including a video demonstrating such differences.  We discussed how the learning styles differ when applied to the study of law.  Visual learners learn best when information is presented in a written language or via pictures or diagrams.  Auditory learners learn best when information is presented in a spoken language format.  Kinesthetic learners learn best when they can use their sense of touch and move about.

In practical application, these learning styles are not set in stone.  While people tend to have a preference for one style over another, they can develop all of the learning styles.  This makes studying etc. much more effective.

You can find out your learning style by taking any one of these tests:

• Education Planner
• Edutopia
• What Is My Learning Style

Seguing from learning styles to personality types, Dr. Brosseit spoke on “Using Psychological Type Theory to Optimize Performance in the Study and Practice of Law.”  He began with a few important points:

1. Understanding psychological type makes students aware of their natural ways of thinking so they can better understand their behaviors and select the approaches most likely to optimize performance in any given situation.
2. The instrument/indicator does not dictate your psychological type; it is merely a tool to help you determine your type for yourself.
3. No single psychological type is inherently better suited for the study and practice of law.
4. While psychological type often indicates the approaches that are most likely to be effective for particular personality types, students with the same psychological type are not all identical in their learning behaviors.

Dr. Brosseit went on to discuss the differences between the four dichotomies that make up the MBTI: Direction of Energy (E vs. I); Perception (S vs. N); Judgment (T vs. F); and Lifestyle Orientation (J vs. P).

• Direction of Energy: how one communicates and applies information
  • Extraversion (E)
    • Focus on the world outside of themselves
    • Talk things through with others as a means of gaining deeper understanding of information
  • Introversion (I)
    • Prefer to operate in their inner world to ponder ideas and understand information
    • Share ideas to check the accuracy of their understanding only after they have fully thought through and understood the information
• Perception: how one gathers and processes information
  • Sensing (S)
    • Focus on concrete information, specific scenarios, and practical application of legal rules and standards
    • Like to read cases and see detailed examples before constructing an overview or employing inductive reasoning to form broad generalizations
  • Intuition (N)
    • Naturally see connections, patterns, and broader principles among cases, context, rules, and principles
    • Prefer to see a general overview to have a roadmap or framework for understanding before reading specific cases or employing deductive reasoning to analyze specific fact patterns
• Judgment: how one evaluates situations and makes decisions
  • Thinking (T)
    • Naturally focus on objective, logical application of law to facts
    • May tend to value justice over mercy
  • Feeling (F)
    • Evaluate cases by engaging in factual scenarios and identifying one or the other of the parties to assess the impact of judicial reasoning on the people involved
    • May tend to value mercy over justice
• Lifestyle Orientation: how one conducts day-to-day life
  • Judgement (J)
    • Apply evaluative processes to organizing personal and professional life
    • Prefer to follow set schedules, keep materials and notes organized, and complete assignments before deadlines
  • Perceiving (P)
    • Value flexibility to adjust to new information or changes in the environment
    • Prefer to work in spurts when inspired or pushed by deadlines

Dr. Brosseit mentioned an intriguing chart that displayed the different MBTI types and what their primary vs. secondary etc. functions were.  Of note, extroverts extravert their primary function while introverts extravert their secondary function.  This means that extroverts continually show their best function to the world while introverts show their second best.  Knowing this, an introvert can work at overcoming this tendency.

Dr. Brosseit also looked into how the MBTI types are distributed amongst lawyers.  Of note, the top six types found in lawyers are:

1. ISTJ (17.8%)
2. ESTJ (10.3%)
3. INTJ (13.1%)
4. ENTP (9.7%)
5. INTP (9.4%)
6. ENTJ (9.0%)

You may notice that the top six types are all of the (T) variety.  This does NOT mean that Feelers cannot be successful lawyers.  It simply means that the (T) type is more prominent in the legal community.

If you don’t know your MBTI type, check out this free unofficial MBTI indicator.  We recommend that you take it a few times or take a few different indicators in order to best know your MBTI type.

If you’re interested in how your psychological type can help you as a law student and future attorney (or as an attorney already), check out this book: Juris Types: Learning Law through Self-Understanding by Martha M. Peters & Don Peters.  This book looks into things such as study approaches, organization methods, exam preparation strategies, exam taking techniques, strategies for legal practice, and much more!

We hope you found this information as fascinating and useful as we did!  Knowing your learning style and, more importantly, your MBTI type can help you learn and study more efficiently and effectively; however, this knowledge goes beyond law school.  Learning about who you are and how you think and act and why as well as why other people around you act the way they do can mean the difference between happiness and misery in your life.

Final Exams: New Items in Our Collection!

Every student wants the magic recipe for success on their final exams.  While I don’t claim to be in possession of such a recipe, I do have several new books to recommend to help with finals.

• 1000 Days to the Bar: But the Practice of Law Begins Now!  This title “explains the relationship between the professional practice of law and the practice you need to perform each week to achieve your law school objectives.”  Take advantage of this title to assist you in developing practice-ready skills while studying for your exams!

• Law School Exams: A Guide to Better Grades.  “Written from the perspective of a student with a 4.0 GPA, this book offers fresh and unique insights on law school exams by stripping the exam format into a series of repeatable steps and building blocks. It also teaches students how to ‘prepare for exams, instead of preparing for class,’ with proven time-management, outlining, and case-briefing techniques. Based on the author’s highly successful seminar series at the University of Miami, these strategies have already helped hundreds of law students improve their grades. Law School Exams: A Guide to Better Grades is perfect for the over-achieving law student who is aiming for perfect grades, the struggling upper-division student who needs guidance to stay afloat, or the eager pre-law student who wants a peek at what lies ahead.”

• Unlocking the Secrets of Legal Genius: Measuring Specialist Legal Expertise Through Think-Aloud Verbal Protocol Analysis.  “This book outlines an empirically-proven approach to investigating the unique characteristics of legal thinking – particularly the thinking of legal experts – through the use of experimental methods and techniques from the field of cognitive science.  It describes in detail the processes of identifying appropriately qualified test subjects, ranking them according to their levels of likely expertise, engaging them with specially designed problem-based tests, and then analysing the resulting qualitative and quantitative data to identify distinguishing cognitive traits and behaviors.  The findings presented by the author have the potential to materially improve the assessment methods used in lawyer accreditation schemes, change how clients assess the expertise of their legal advisers, increase the effectiveness of recruitment and in-house training programs within law firms, and lead to new approaches for the design and delivery of post-graduate education at law schools.”

• Stress, Tests, and Success: The Ultimate Law School Survival Guide.  This title “is a must read for any student wanting to finish at the top of his or her law school class without having to weed through hundreds and hundreds of pages of information to find out how to do it.  With this guide, experiencing success in law school and as a new lawyer is only a few pages away.”

As I mentioned before, there is no magic recipe to success in law school; however, these resources along with the many others available in our library can help you figure out your keys to law school success.

Preparing Your Mind

As you may know, there are three main learning types: auditory; visual; kinesthetic.  How you learn can greatly influence how well you do in school, especially at the graduate level where you’re flooded with information that you need to remember, both for the finals and for life after school.  Absorbing that information and retaining it can be extremely difficult if you don’t understand how you learn.  Here’s a simple quiz that will tell which of the three main types you are: What’s Your Learning Style?.

The learning styles can get more in-depth than the main three, however, as seen in this article by Richard M. Felder & Barbara A. Soloman: Learning Styles and Strategies.  In the article, they discuss the differences in learning types on four different scales:

The article discusses each end of the different spectrum and gives advice on how to best learn effectively dependent upon which end of the spectrum you favor.  They have also created a test to determine where you fall in each category: Index of Learning Styles Questionnaire.  Their questionnaire plots you in the four categories on a numbered scale, which can assist you in determining how evenly balanced you are or how much you favor one style over the other.

In practical application, the Law Library has numerous tools available to assist students in their study efforts.  These tools cover all aspects of learning.  We have audio materials, such as the Sum & Substance series, that comprise several hours of audible explanation of various topics of law.  We have more hands-on materials, such as the Law in a Flash series of flashcards covering all major areas of law, as well as some charts for more complicated areas of law.  Of course, we also have numerous outlines and other written study aids for the reading aspect of learning.  

In addition, I advise students who learn better kinesthetically or visually to write out their outlines by hand and to draw up charts and graphs to help them visualize how the material for a particular class fits together.  The charts help especially in classes where there are multiple sequences of events or rules that trigger a particular line of thinking or analysis, such as civil procedure, evidence, or constitutional law.

Above all else, remember that every person has a unique learning style, specific to them.  Once you figure out yours, you will be able to better understand how you learn and how you need to format your studying and class time to better assist the intake of knowledge.