Abstract
Law schools routinely collect end-of-semester teaching evaluations. However, little guidance exists—from law schools and in the legal literature—on soliciting formative, mid-semester feedback from students. This type of feedback is particularly well-suited to the clinical setting, where learning, supervision, and professional identity formation are intertwined. Drawing on higher-education research to show that mid-semester feedback more effectively improves engagement, learning, and instructional practice for current students, this article analyzes how mid-semester feedback aligns with core goals of clinical pedagogy, including reflective practice, metacognition, professional identity formation, and the lawyering skills of giving and receiving feedback. It then addresses common obstacles—time and bandwidth constraints, uneven or non-actionable comments, candor and anonymity concerns, and bias—and explains how design choices about goals, timing, participants, anonymity, collection modes, question forms, and framing can mitigate these problems. The article further offers concrete implementation strategies for reviewing and responding to student input in seminar, supervision, and individual meetings. Finally, it provides adaptable questionnaires to enable clinicians to embed a sustainable mid-semester feedback practice in their courses.
Repository Citation
Christine Speidel, Caroline Wick & Tamar Alexanian,
Listening Midstream: Mid-Semester Feedback from Students for Clinicians,
32
Clinical L. Rev.
255
(2026).
Available at:
https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/facsch_lawrev/2361