It's not Me, It's You; Actually, Maybe it is Me: Supervising Millennials in the Context of Client-Centered Lawyering and Changing Learning Styles

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Session Type: AALS Programs

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: N/A

Room: Wilson Room

Floor: Third Floor

One of the great pleasures of clinical teaching is supervising students who bring in new perspectives, ideas, and talents. At the same time, as we get older more mature (wiser?), our students remain the same age, resulting in the joy, and the challenge, of teaching across generations in a way that requires attentiveness and creativity. Our students come to us with a different set of cultural references and perspectives that are influenced by societal norms, social media, and learning styles.
The “millennial” generation has presented clinical professors, who are most often not millennials, with new and unique opportunities to provide effective supervision. Millennials’ learning styles are changing in the age of technology and clinical professors need to consider how to bridge the generation and cultural divide and teach in a way that recognizes these differences while also preparing students for practice. We will discuss supervision and seminar teaching to reveal a series of complications that often arise when teaching across generations.
The presenters will lead a discussion to identify problems in supervision and in seminar teaching, develop a list of challenges, discuss the techniques used by clinical professors, and brainstorm additional solutions. The goals and the learning objectives of the session include considering and discussing the stereotypes concerning millennials and the accuracy of those stereotypes, identifying and discussing the joys and challenges of cross generational supervision, and creating a set of tools and techniques that will enable clinical professors to best handle these issues. At the end of the session, we will provide attendees with concrete takeaways (including a bibliography) to assist us all in adapting to the constantly evolving learning style of our students.