This paper examines the role of the supervisor in legal clinic contexts. Throughout the student-supervisor relationship, teaching occurs in many ways: dialectic teaching, didactic teaching, evaluation, demonstration, or a combination of some or all of these teaching methods.
The relationship between student and supervisor is constantly changing. There are several stages students pass through while acquiring the skills and knowledge necessary to become capable and effective lawyers. At the beginning stages, students often feel overwhelmed by the experience and possess limited lawyering skills. Accordingly, students require vast amounts of specific information. The supervisor must make initial decisions in cases, and students must receive the underlying rationale for each direction. Supervisors must develop friendly, supportive behaviours while insisting on high levels of student performance simultaneously. At the middle stage, students can take more responsibility and initiative for their cases. At this stage, students can begin to approach their cases as a collaborative experience involving both the student and the supervisor. At the final stage, students are sufficiently secure and competent to act, in effect, as lawyers in their own right. The supervisor has an ethical obligation to prevent incompetent representation. Thus, the supervisor’s role at this stage is to be a confirmer and guider, essentially a safeguard against serious error. Note that the method described here is a good example of early approaches to American supervision in clinical legal education.
Peter Toll Hoffman, “The Stages of the Clinical Supervisory Relationship” (1986) 4 Antioch LJ 301.
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