This chapter proposes that it is valuable for clinical supervisors to identify and understand their various roles with respect to their associated professional expectations to ensure that they adopt a mindful and balanced approach to supervision.
Clinical supervisors hold many roles: legal practice manager, senior lawyer, risk manager, assessor of written work and performance, counsellor, mentor, advisor, and commentator. This makes the supervisory relationship a complicated environment where supervisors must balance autonomy and collegiate atmospheres while ensuring students are reliable and accurate in their work. This can be challenging, particularly in light of the impartiality inherent in supervision and partiality inherent in mentoring.
There are three influential elements of supervisorial impact on clinic students: pedagogy in the clinic (including personalizing learning and autonomy support), mentoring and role modelling.
Clinic pedagogy is enriched with ideas of autonomy, mastery, insight, reflective capacity, and role assumption. Important factors in student development of professional identity include nuanced guidance and continuous feedback, cognitive development, and social interaction. Personalizing learning requires an understanding that each student has different personal and educational needs. Supervisorial guidance supports students in making connections between existing experience, theory, and legal practice. Autonomy support is a structured and intentional process involving providing students with as much choice as possible, providing meaningful rationales when choice is not available, and considering the students’ point of view concerning the particular task.
Mentoring has many forms. It can be formal, informal, or instrumental. It can involve coaching, career advice, advancement support, and protection. Although clinic supervisors do not take on a formal mentoring role, much of their work is characteristic of mentoring and can have a positive impact on student’s abilities relating to teamwork and communication skills, career, leadership readiness, and emotional intelligence.
Lastly, the third influential function of clinical supervisors, role modelling, involves students learning from what they have seen others do; thus, it is critical that supervisors act in a manner where they are aware of the overt messages they send and the interactions they have.
Margaret Castles & Carol Boothby, “What Hat Shall I Wear Today? Exploring the Professional and Ethical Implications of Law Clinic Supervision” in Caroline Stevens and Rachael Field, eds, Educating for Well-being in Law and Practice, (London: Routledge, 2020) 117.
Leave a Reply