Conceptualizing Student Practice for the 21st Century: Educational and Ethical Considerations in Modernizing the District of Columbia Student Practice Rules

This article traces the history of the amendment process. It provides a short history of student practice rules and then, using the student practice rule in effect in the District of Columbia prior to the 2014 amendments, describes the various components of those rules that courts and bars across the nation have implemented to assist courts, advance legal education, and preserve advocates’ ethical obligations to clients. It then describes some of the comments to the proposed amendments offered by the District of Columbia Bar and other D.C. lawyers during the public comment period and the modifications to the District of Columbia student practice rule that the District of Columbia Court of Appeals accepted. Finally, it discusses some areas of disagreement that arose during the process and a description of the reasons for those disagreements

Where to Begin? Training New Teachers in the Art of Clinical Pedagogy

Legal educators and the legal academy have long made the mistaken assumption that new teachers have an intuitive grasp of teaching methodology based on their experiences as students, and that therefore they can begin and continue teaching throughout their careers without any understanding of teaching methodology. Clinical teachers in particular face unique pedagogical challenges relating to class goals, supervisory methods, feedback, and grading. These challenges are magnified by the existence of clients and by the need to engage with students regarding the ethics of legal practice and cultural difference. This article attempts to set forth some of the critical questions new teachers must answer by describing the goals and content of a clinical pedagogy course designed by the Georgetown Law Center faculty to train graduate clinical teaching fellows and facilitate their entry into the academy. The article (and program it describes) rests on six fundamental beliefs: clinical teaching is different from and more expansive than doctrinal teaching or professional legal practice; clinical teaching is goal driven and based on backward design; faculty intervention must be intentional and based on making choices that further a student’s education; clinical education should be based on an expansive theory of justice; client and student needs are equally important in a clinical program and neither need be sacrificed for the other; and clinical teaching is personal and designed to accept students where they are and to maximize their learning potential. The Georgetown training program emphasizes intentional and reflective supervision and creative and adaptive teaching methods. The major focuses of the course are the history of clinical education and its contemporary status in the academy; techniques of supervision and reflection; relevant values, ethics, and morals of clinical teaching; pedagogical methods for structuring classroom teaching; and the interrelationship of feedback, evaluation, and grading in clinical courses. The article provides the syllabus for the program and engages in an in-depth discussion of each element of the course to help new clinical teachers answer the question “where should I begin?

Developing a Teacher Training Program for New Clinical Teachers

Where to Begin? Training New Teachers in the Art of Clinical Pedagogy, an article published in the Spring, 2012, issue of the Clinical Law Review, gave a full description of Georgetown’s course in clinical pedagogy. That article set forth some of the critical questions new teachers must ask and answer by describing the goals, content, and execution of the course. This article describes hows, whens, and whys of the program, focusing on how our faculty, over a period of many years, created and revised the curriculum for the Pedagogy course. It also describes the choices we made as we developed the course. Although it may be of interest to all clinical teachers, this article’s main audience is more experienced teachers within a region whose schools regularly meet to discuss issues relating to clinical pedagogy, clinic directors at schools that hire several clinical teachers in a short period of time, and teachers who wish to develop a teacher training program for new clinical teachers. The two articles, when read together, will give those teachers and directors an understanding of the choices we made in developing the teacher-training program at our school and provide an outline to use when developing similar programs tailored to meet the needs of their own schools and faculties