Background, Aims and Methods

The American Bar Association has added professional identity, interpreted to include well-being practices, to the curricular requirements for American law schools. To educate my students at Suffolk U. Law School about well-being, I have added Vitality to Dr. Martin Seligman’s flourishing framework of Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Achievement (PERMA). To make the resulting six elements easier to remember, I reordered them into the acronym REVAMP, reinforcing it with activities like these:

• I had custom dice made for my students using the six REVAMP letters, one on each side of the cube, which I encourage them to roll as a reminder to cultivate that element, and log their positive activities in a journal entry as described below.
• For Relationships, I ask my students to practice delivering bad news well, following a protocol taught by Dr. Chris Feudtner, a pediatric palliative care physician.
• For Engagement, I ask the students to enhance their capacity for focused attention through meditation.
• For Vitality, I invite fitness professionals to show the students how to improve their posture as well as exercise more effectively.
• For Achievement, I ask the students to write a resume about how they used their signature strengths in addition to their legal knowledge and skill.
• For Meaning, I ask the students to write a letter of encouragement to a successor law student including how they hope their own learning will make a positive impact.
• For Positive emotions, I ask the students to log time spent on positive activities just as they would on a client matter.

Results and Conclusion:

While I have no IRB approved survey of student response to these initiatives, I do ask my students to write and present an individualized Professional Development Plan. In their Plans, I ask the students to cite to their learning from these and other REVAMP activities and describe how they will use their REVAMP practices in the future.