An associate professor of law, Kaas has been a clinical teacher for 35 years, instructing and guiding students through clinical legal education. Clinical legal education involves students being in a role as if they are lawyers allowing them to work on real cases with real clients.

For her first 20 years, Kaas taught at an in-house clinic where she supervised law students directly as the lawyer of record. After about 16 years in the role, Kaas shepherded externship teaching. After teaching all three types of experiential courses, Kaas was elevated to associate dean of experiential education.

Kaas was in charge of the whole externship program in hew new role. Finding the new role to be enormously fun and professionally rewarding, she decided to stay in externships along with her other teaching duties.

“The hallmark of a good externship program and skilled teaching is the ability and commitment to helping students find a placement that fits them, and will give them the experiences that will help them continue to learn. For each student, it might be a very different kind of placement, depending on their interests and prior experiences,” said Kaas.

Setting goals for herself and the students, Kaas wanted to make sure that regardless of where students are in their career journey, they were a step ahead in the game. As student placement varies from student to student, Kaas found it important that students grow and feel satisfied with their placement and the extent to which the externship program complements other experiential courses.

Within their externships, students and professors work together to determine the best course of action, including individualized care and counseling when figuring out what courses to take, what experience a student needs and in what sequence to do so. Because the externship experience is different for each student, Kaas measured success through student growth and satisfaction especially when reading their self-evaluations and reflection paper.

“When I see an explosion of insight— about themselves and about what it really means to be a lawyer — then I know I have done a great job,” said Kaas.

Outside of teaching and overseeing the externship program at Quinnipiac, Kaas felt she had something to offer in the national clinical teaching community. With her experience teaching all three types of experiential learning courses and being asked to serve as the Associate Dean of Experiential Education, Kaas wanted to help the movement for excellence in clinical teaching continue to evolve.

Participating in national conferences, Kaas not only reflected on her experience in clinical teaching, but brought back books and articles filled with ideas that helped her develop her own teaching skills in the national community. Wanting to advance the field and be a leader for the national clinical teaching community, something she is enormously proud of, she helped edit and write chapters for the book, “Building on Best Practices in Legal Education”.

“It has been gratifying to go to conferences over the years, to share my ideas and to have people thank me for helping them become better clinical teachers — from reading what I have written and from listening to my presentations,” said Kaas. “This award affirmed that all of that was time well spent.” 

This award — presented recently at the Externships 12 Conference in Boston — is a culmination of a lifetime of work toward building generations of the whole lawyer.

Over the coming year, Kaas will be working closely with Alice Rosenthal, assistant dean of experiential education, co-director of externships and clinical professor of law.

One of the Rosenthal's immediate goals is to build a "sixth semester anywhere" program, to enable students to be embedded full-time for academic credit with a particular organization, whether in the state or eventually around the country.