Beyond Burnout: Teaching Engagement as Self-Care

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

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Clinicians and scholars have described the experience of providing direct services as a continuum with “burnout” existing as one pole and “engagement” as its positive opposite, defined by the qualities of energy, involvement, and effectiveness. While consciousness about the importance of wellness and self-care has risen, discussion and practice have tended to focus on avoiding burnout instead of sustaining engagement. Much wellness discourse focuses on selfcare as a counterbalance to work, on what happens in our “free” non-work time. Far less has been said about how developing, recognizing, and sustaining positive engagement with our work can strengthen resilience and help push back against burnout. Drawing on Ron Tyler’s seminal piece, The First Thing We Do, Let’s Heal All the Law Students: Incorporating Self-Care into a Criminal Defense Clinic, we will explore how to use student supervision sessions to teach students techniques to develop and sustain positive engagement in their practice. This session will begin with an introduction to the burnout-engagement continuum, identifying ways that promoting positive engagement with clinic work can be a form of self-care. The session will then feature roleplays based on the presenters’ own experiences during student supervision. Participants will break up into small groups to discuss the roleplays and to develop strategies for identifying and sustaining student engagement with an eye toward resilience. Presenters will share techniques and strategies for sustaining student engagement in the real-life experiences that inspired the role plays. Finally, presenters will turn the lens back on ourselves, prompting exploration through facilitated discussion of what this concept of engagement as selfcare might look like in our own lives. Participants will leave with ideas for new techniques to promote positive student engagement through supervision with the goal of promoting student resilience in their clinical and future employment experiences