Patrick C Brayer, “A Law Clinic Systems Theory and the Pedagogy of Interaction: Creating a Legal Learning System”

This article explores several techniques to maximize student experience based on professional interactions in the law school clinic. It further sets out a pedagogical approach to clinic design and teaching by advancing a clinical systems theory, explaining how law students develop and grow by interacting with their learning system environment, including teaching students how to learn from others (the people they work for and with), teaching students how to learn from clients, and teaching students how to learn by interacting mentally and emotionally with themselves.

Clinical systems theory suggests that students should reframe how they look at their surroundings so that the challenges that make up their professional system can be used as solutions.  Clinical supervisors can help students reframe their interactions, maximizing professional interactions and teaching from emerging interactive patterns. They can do this by framing practice issues around the developing professional interactive life of the student. In this model, the role of the supervisor is to emphasize the community responsibility to complete the task.

Within clinics, there are a myriad of subsystem relationships: student-attorney, student-support staff, student-investigator, student-student, student-court clerk, student-judge, and student-client. The student learns new skills by developing transactional patterns with each new professional relationship. Supervisors can be effective role models in establishing standards of professional conduct in the workplace, but a student-based community that regulates professionalism within the group can be more impactful on individual students.

Implementing a systems theory in clinics requires a team of supervisors to assist students. By providing a team supervision system, students can learn how to work in a group while developing professional relationships with a range of individuals who possess different personalities and practice types. Providing students with the opportunity to work with a range of individuals teaches them how to operate within new professional practice hierarchies while remaining an autonomous practitioner when faced with institutional pressures.

Patrick C Brayer, “A Law Clinic Systems Theory and the Pedagogy of Interaction: Creating a Legal Learning System” (2012) 12:1 Conn Pub Interest L J 49.