Many clinical professors enter academia through a teaching fellowship. These opportunities vary widely, but typically provide exposure to critical aspects of clinical teaching, including seminar design and teaching, student supervision, and scholarship. Despite the varieties in design, the goal of the clinical fellowship echoes that of clinical teaching generally: through the prepare-perform-reflect model, fellows develop a toolkit of transferrable skills that will help them thrive in clinic director positions.
For some fellows, the transition from a supervised fellowship to directing their own clinic can feel like the net is no longer under the tightrope. Supervising larger numbers of students, designing and teaching more (if not all) seminar classes, and finding time to write—often in the face of summer coverage issues—can feel overwhelming. Former fellows find themselves struggling to consistently implement the best practices they internalized during their fellowships and can be left feeling like they are “cutting corners” when they deviate from their training.
The panelists in this presentation are all former clinical teaching fellows who have been directing or have directed their own clinics for several years. The ultimate goal for this presentation is to validate the tension new clinic directors may feel in this new clinical setting and help them think through how to preserve the crux of their learning when it is not always possible to reproduce it.