Using video creatively to promote and study interaction within a learning group

Television now fulfils many of the needs which were previously satisfied by public hangings. As entertainment, it has inherited the crudity, vividness and intimacy of the wood‐cut illustrations which used to feature in the lurid ‘Police Reports’ and other penny crime‐sheets of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Series like “Perry Mason” and “Crown Court” have fired the popular imagination by exploiting the drama inherent in the confrontation and cross‐examination of the court room. Although this kind of material is of very limited value for training and educational purposes, there is still tremendous potential for the imaginative use of video in this area. At Warwick University, for example, a structured teaching programme to enable behavioural change in students who are learning about lawyer/client interviewing, has proved extremely successful. Video recording and replay has become such an important element in the programme that the School of Law has acquired its own video equipment for teaching students. Research conducted by Avrom and Lorraine Sherr (with the help of a Nuffield Grant) demonstrated that a group of articled clerks who were able to watch their recorded interviews on video, in addition to taking part in formal teaching and top‐up' reading, performed significantly better than groups which took part only in the teaching and reading or only in the reading. Interestingly, there was little difference between the last two groups, (i.e., teaching and reading or reading only) suggesting that the formal teaching on its own produced no significant variation in performance.