David F Chavkin, “Matchmaker, Matchmaker: Student Collaboration in Clinical Programs”

This article explores student collaboration in representing clients in clinical courses. It discusses both the benefits and disadvantages of putting students in teams. This article includes a literature review on collaboration and teamwork, as well as interviews with clinicians and students. The author provides recommendations to enhance collaboration in clinical programs. In this model, students were put in pairs to work on client matters.

Collaboration requires time and effort. The more students collaborate, the better they collaborate. The more they appreciate collaboration, the more likely they will collaborate in the future. Student interactions are deeply driven and impeded by societal factors, including race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. To address some of these socialization factors that may inhibit communication, clinicians may pair students in ways designed to challenge preconceptions and experiences). By allowing students to work in teams, they can filter client life experiences through multiple personal life experiences and potentially develop richer and more accurate understandings of their clients. Moreover, pairing students can have positive impacts on motivation, keeping student anxieties within creative limits (reasonably anxiety that fosters realization of the goals of clinical education).

Pairing can also have downsides (eg, ethical problems, decision-making tensions, and various inefficiencies that arise in the process of working with someone else, such as sharing of information, coordination, etc.). Students may also be less inclined to bring up personal issues during joint case supervision meetings.

Student collaboration may also be beneficial for supervisors who are often removed from direct involvement with clients. This can lead to uncertainties with respect to what is going on in a case. The pairing of students can help to lessen these uncertainties. Case supervision sessions may give rise to differences in student perception. When supervisors identify these differences and relational tensions, they provide insights into useful questions for the future resolution of disparities among students. Despite these benefits, collaboration may result in several problems from the supervisor’s perspective. For instance, clinicians supervising students in teams may find it difficult to attribute work to individual students, and supervision meetings become longer and more complex.

Clinical programs can enhance collaboration by ensuring that clinicians explicitly identify the development of collaboration skills as a goal of clinical education. Clinicians must then assign students to pairs or teams and ensure work is truly collaborative rather than parallel work models where students divide responsibility. Clinicians need to explicitly identify collaboration as one of the areas in which students will be evaluated during the clinic. Clinicians should ensure that student pairing decisions are made with educational and representational goals in mind. Finally, supervisors should practice collaboration in their own work. Generally, clinicians work independently, which does not produce the results potentially achievable through meaningful collaboration. This requires clinicians to teach in models that are not encompassing of parallel models of collaboration where clinicians divide up the subject matter of seminars and teach them individually. When clinical teachers collaborate, they can eliminate the potentially detrimental impact of individual teaching on students.

David F Chavkin, “Matchmaker, Matchmaker: Student Collaboration in Clinical Programs” (1994) 1:2 Clinical L Rev 199.