Over the past few years, I have been thinking a lot about ways that clinical and non-clinical teaching are connected. It started with an assignment I got from the AALS Clinical Section to help with a program for the national meeting on how non-clinical teachers might use and are using clinical methodology in their classes. But whether we can use similar methodologies or whether non-clinicians can borrow some of what clinicians know about teaching in their classes is different from whether we are teaching toward the same goals. Perhaps some of my questions come from my familiarity with the goals clinicians have, which we have been expressing for a long time. Clinicians did not need ABA Standard 302 or 315 to tell us that we should be setting out explicit learning outcomes and provide formative and summative assessments\u2014we have been doing so more explicitly that I am familiar with non-clinical teachers doing the same. We can roll them off\u2014among other goals, I want my students to learn to learn from practice; to learn to understand their clients\u2019 goals and to learn to see and consider the value of their clients\u2019 and their collaborators\u2019 view of the law and facts; to practice intentionally and effectively; and to work as a team with other professionals and with their clients. I have wondered how clinical teaching goals like these mesh with what might be taught in a non-clinical class limited to substantive law, and whether our learning goals are and could be the same.<\/p>\n
This fall, I have been given the opportunity to consider this first hand as I cross over for the first time to teaching a non-clinical class in poverty law. It is part of Temple\u2019s curricular requirement that students take a class writing serial short papers, a requirement designed to help students learn to express themselves in writing to legal and non-legal audiences in a concise manner. As such, it is a little \u201cskillsy\u201d. However, it also designed to give students in-depth substantive knowledge on a particular subject matter. I found myself describing the following goals, among others: leaving the class with a working knowledge of the law and how the law connects to other laws; developing critical analysis skills to see issues from many sides and why another might view the law differently; writing effectively; understanding the role of the lawyer not just as an observer of the law but as a player who can identify strategies for change; and understanding the needs of a client group and particularly a legally under-served one. It strikes me that many of these goals are quite similar to ones that I would have for my clinical students.<\/p>\n
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