Leah Wortham, Catherine F Klein & Beryl Blaustone, “Autonomy-Mastery Purpose: Structuring Clinical Courses to Enhance These Critical Educational Goals”

This article examines how clinical law teachers can use intrinsic motivation and theories to improve the quality of law student’s learning.  The underlying theory assumes that people interact constantly and dynamically with their surroundings rather than predictably. However, other theories, including the self-determination continuum, as replicated below, provide insight into how a law student might internalize motivation toward professional values. This paradigm provides supervisors with a tool to encourage law students to strive for positive performance while encouraging them to embrace broader goals for their skills.

Further, the authors contrast autonomy-supportive teacher behaviours with controlling instructional behaviours in the clinical context. Research has shown that autonomy-supportive teachers, compared with students with controlling teachers, experience not only greater perceived autonomy but more positive functions in terms of emotionality, creativity, intrinsic motivation, psychological well-being, conceptual understanding, and more. Supervisors should encourage students to take an active role in their learning as they progress toward mastery. Teaching mastery requires the teacher to provide a structured approach to learning rather than being completely open-ended and non-directive. Structure may include articulating a framework for reflection and incorporating these mechanisms into the content of supervision. Supervisors should encourage students and remind them that learning is a constant process and will be an object of their career. They should ensure communication is effective while questioning students about their assumptions.

The authors further discuss clinics’ needs for relatedness and focus on clinical education’s capacity to support the development of students’ learning, well-being, and sense of purpose. As defined by Johnmarshall Reeve, relatedness is “the psychological need to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with other people, and it reflects the desire to be emotionally connected to and interpersonally involved in warm relationships”. This has an element of trust that our best interests, as people and future lawyers, are considered. Clinicians can support students’ needs for relatedness by nurturing their intrinsic motivations. Furthermore, when supervisors encourage the use of mastery as a mindset, supporting perseverance and passion for long term goals of students, teaching in a structured manner rather than completely open-ended and non-directive, providing students opportunities with repeated opportunities to explore what they can and can’t control with a given task, affirming student capability, clear communication, deliberate attention to reducing assumptions by the student, and taking time to ensure student understanding.

Leah Wortham, Catherine F Klein & Beryl Blaustone, “Autonomy-Mastery Purpose: Structuring Clinical Courses to Enhance These Critical Educational Goals” (2012) 18 Int’l J Clinical Leg Educ 105.