Harriet N Katz, “Reconsidering Collaboration and Modeling: Enriching Clinical Pedagogy”

This article suggests that non-directive supervision, collaboration and modelling enhance students’ experience and understanding of the lawyer’s role within clinical education. Collaboration and modelling are highly intertwined, the former reinforcing the latter.

Non-directive supervision facilitates the advancement of two primary educational goal: fully understanding the role of lawyers and developing a mode of continued growth in legal skills and values. Under this type of supervision, students hold a heightened level of autonomy in role assumption; thus, they can confront personal and professional issues of lawyering. Student views support non-directive supervision, allowing for a critical understanding of the lawyer role and providing active experience.

Notably, the role assumption present in non-directive supervision can inhibit learning for students with a lower confidence level, maturity, or learning style that requires slower exposure to full lawyering responsibility. Role assumption is reinforced through collaboration when students can approach supervisors with initial work products and engage in an exchange of ideas.  As such, a sole focus on non-directive supervision is an insufficient teaching method. Rather, the author argues that clinical education that embraces collaboration, modelling, and nondirective supervision, used together, is a powerful teaching method for clinicians.

Harriet N Katz, “Reconsidering Collaboration and Modeling: Enriching Clinical Pedagogy” (2005) 41:2 Gonz L Rev 315.