Archie Zariski & Irene Styles, Supervising Students in Clinical Legal Education, Handbook with Exercises

This Australian handbook sets out guidelines for the supervisory relationship in clinical legal education. It includes information about effective supervision skills, stages of growth, juggling serving clients and students, dealing with different values and personalities, and managing time and information. It concludes by setting out a series of suggestions and resources.

This handbook contains exercises, reflective questions for clinic supervisors, and transcripts of recorded meetings between students and supervisors in an Australian legal clinic.

The supervisory relationship includes a variety of roles in their interactions with students, which the handbook describes as: coach, professional mentor, and quality controller. This role differs from standard student-teacher relationships for many reasons. In a clinic, supervisors and students share a common goal of serving clients. Supervisors interact with relatively few students at once, and supervisors spend more time with individual students.

Supervisors play an important role in helping students realize their inadequate or biased beliefs and help change them through learning. They can encourage this through intellectual acts of teaching (i.e., explaining, demonstrating, defining), strategic acts of teaching (i.e., planning, guiding, counseling), and moral acts of teaching (i.e., modelling behaviour and concerns for ethics).

The handbook notes a number of teaching skills:

1. Active listening (monitor student understanding, needs, etc.)
2. Interpersonal skills (encouragement, support)
3. Communication techniques (feedback)
4. Questioning skills (encouraging reflection, insight, etc.)

Supervisors often have to weigh their duty to a student against their duty to a client, a common and challenging situation for many supervisors. Five considerations a supervisor should have in mind are:

1. Respect for the client’s professional relationship with the student and expectations flowing from that relationship;
2. Respect for the client’s right to make an informed decision about student representation and its advantages or disadvantages;
3. Concern for the client reflected by the clinical teacher’s ability to diagnose and predict student competencies adequately;
4. Concern for the client reflected by the clinical teacher’s readiness and competence to assume client representation responsibilities; and
5. Concern for adverse collateral consequences to the client and others, which might be avoided through intervention.

Additionally, supervisors must acknowledge the various personalities at play and understand the limitations of their own expertise, all the while supporting and encouraging student growth.

Archie Zariski & Irene Styles, Supervising Students in Clinical Legal Education, Handbook with Exercises, Handbook (Murdoch University, 2001).