Building reflection into the clinic supervision experience: research methods for the reflective teacher

Clinical legal education is a self-directed learning environment in which students learn from experience with the support of the design of the environment and the teacher (supervisor). There is emergent research concerning the response of individual students and groups of students in these environments but our understanding of how these environments are shaped and responded to remains at the exploratory stage. As part of my doctoral research I am undertaking a reflective inquiry into the experience of my students and my own teaching practice to inquire further into this phenomenon. This article provides a reflexive personal context for the research that I am currently undertaking in terms of how I came to the research, its purpose and design. I intend reporting the results of the research in a future publication. At the time of writing, I have completed collection of the data for my research and am in the process of analysing the results and writing up my research.