THE TRB STORY

As with most things, there is a backstory to the TRB Retrospective!

For the past year, Cat has been producing a podcast called Zooming Through Law School with two awesome Vanderbilt Law colleagues, Chris Meyers and Rachael Andersen-Watts. And in each episode, they do a Rose-Bud-Thorn round of the current news relevant to legal education and practice in the time of COVID: Rose: what is something good that's happening? Bud: what is something that has the potential to grow into something good? Thorn: what is not so good right now?

(Cat also has been doing the R-B-T exercise with her family forever — it's a great way to get kids talking about their day!)

Rose-Bud-Thorn is both a mindfulness exercise and retrospective tool and Cat thought adopting and adapting it for the podcast would bring an element of gratitude and mindfulness to the work. And, help to focus not only on what's not going well (which seems like a lot of things, tbh) to make room for acknowledging the *good* things, too.

And, as we thought about how we could capture the many learnings of the past year+ of teaching in the time of COVID, it seemed a natural fit for our purpose. Thus, the TRB Retrospective workshop was born!

We reordered the process a bit, to put the Thorn first, followed by the Rose, and then dig into potential Buds.

Our primary mission with this workshop is to #MakeLegalEdBetter through intentional retrospection and a commitment to learn from our experiences and experiments and iterate going forward.

And, a meta goal is to introduce the very act of retrospection as a thing we can all do, on a regular basis, to improve and iterate as we go forward in the world. And to practice retrospection, to get comfortable with it, and to experience its power.

We look forward to sharing this method in this workshop and are even more excited about what we all will learn from the experience!

For more information on the structure and to apply to participate, visit the Participate page!