Chapter 1: Externship Foundations
As noted earlier in this Chapter, a learning agreement is a document that outlines the agreed-upon learning goals in a particular placement. Typically, the law school will have a template that a student completes with the approval of their onsite supervisor. Usually, students will follow up on the agreement throughout the term to ensure the goals are being met.
Goal setting can be a challenging exercise for students (more on this in the “self directed learning” section, above). There are many ways to set goals, and each placement typically has their own approach.
One of the most widely used in business is the concept of “SMART” Goals. Research on the impact of this approach is still developing (see, for example, K. Blaine Lawlor, “Smart Goals: How the Application of Smart Goals can Contribute to Achievement of Student Learning Outcomes” (2012) 39 Developments in Business Simulation and Experiential Learning, online. This approach has also been critiqued for ignoring the context of goal setting (whether this be business, social context, or other). Below is a brief description of SMART goals.
Setting SMART Personal and Professional Goals
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant
- Time-bound
SMART is simply a way to guide goal-setting, which can sometimes be too broad, ambitious, opaque, or general to be of any real use to a student. After setting a goal, consider: is this specific enough to my particular context”; is it measurable (meaning, can you actually assess whether the goal has been met or not); is it achievable (eg, not “I will change the social assistance program in Ontario”, which is not achievable in one term); is it relevant to your specific placement; and, is it time-bound (eg, is it achievable in the time you have available).
- Setting personal goals should start with an internal reflection on your strengths, weaknesses, and your workplace context. These are objectives you set regarding your character, skills and capabilities such as improving your work ethic or building better workplace relationships.
- Students may wish to experiment with different assessments available online such as personality tests (https://www.16personalities.com), empathy tests https://psychology-tools.com/test/empathy-quotient, defense mechanisms or unconscious coping tests https://psychologia.co/defense-mechanisms/. Keep in mind these tests provide ways to think about yourself rather than provide a ‘diagnosis’. Social context makes a major difference in how people are able to function in any given environment.
- A good starting place, in a new work environment, is to observe others and the work culture (see the section, above, regarding “noticing”).
- Identify successful skills and habits in your environment and your current ability in those skills and your current habits.
- Consider your goal; do you want to secure an articling position, hone new skills, resolve a complex legal issue, understand social change?
- Engage development programs offered by your workplace such as leadership training and other initiatives. Seeking out these additional opportunities will give you insight into your workplace and your own professional goals.
- Seek out feedback, continuously improve, and learn from others.
An externship is an excellent opportunity to being dialogue between your “learning zone” and your “performance zone”, described further below.
Eduardo Briceño talks about the “learning zone” and the “performance zone” in “How to get better at the things you care about. This theory is one of the operational assumptions of externship programs. Ability to consciously pivot between one zone and another can help learn and improve. As he states:
“Both of these zones should be part of our lives, but being clear about when we want to be in each of them, with what goal, focus and expectations, helps us better perform and better improve. The performance zone maximizes our immediate performance, while the learning zone maximizes our growth and our future performance. The reason many of us don’t improve much despite our hard work is that we tend to spend almost all of our time in the performance zone. This hinders our growth, and ironically, over the long term, also our performance.”
He references what great lawyers, doctors, and performers do to improve:
“When Beyoncé is on tour, during the concert, she’s in her performance zone, but every night when she gets back to the hotel room, she goes right back into her learning zone. She watches a video of the show that just ended. She identifies opportunities for improvement, for herself, her dancers and her camera staff. And the next morning, everyone receives pages of notes with what to adjust, which they then work on during the day before the next performance. It’s a spiral to ever-increasing capabilities, but we need to know when we seek to learn, and when we seek to perform, and while we want to spend time doing both, the more time we spend in the learning zone, the more we’ll improve.“
This insight is similar to the work of Randall Kiser who interviewed top performing civil litigators about the attributes that contribute to their success. Constant self-reflective, critique, and honest self-knowledge were keys to their success (see “Soft Skills for the Effective Lawyer” (2017).
Watch this TedTalk and consider techniques you might employ to meaningfully and deliberately learn in this externship environment. How might lawyers build firms dedicated to constant improvement and a “growth mindset”?
- Consider: what do you already know from previous experience? Previous experience might include law-related work, but also includes lived experience with justice systems, service jobs, academic experience, and so on. Write down this list of skills.
- Drawing from this list of skills, what prior learning will be helpful in your externship? For example, if you have previous customer service experience, this might help understand what clients are seeking, how to ask good questions, and how to make people feel understood.
- Another important part of an externship (and professional development more generally) is assessing what students are interested in learning. Considering what you already know, what do you want to learn during the placement?
- What types of experiences might be required to gain the type of learning you seek? Note that planning for learning in an externship does not and should not foreclose the “happy accidents” that occur along the way.
- A student’s plan for learning is only one aspect of an externship. The placement itself must have the capacity to support the student’s learning journey. Learning is also dependent on the workplace context in which work occurs. What is the placement site willing and able to teach the extern? What resources does the externship site have to devote to onboarding students? How experienced is the externship site in hosting and supporting students?
- Other learning will be dependent on the client and community context. What types of matters are clients experiencing during the period of the externship? At what stage are the matters on which the student will work? What relationships has the site developed with communities, and vice versa? Are there opportunities for engagement? Do the site’s organizational structures include client voice?
- Review the competencies set out in the “Foundations for Practice” IAALS report. Consider any competencies you think may be missing or that might require further investigation.
