We believe that you will find it helpful if, at the very outset of your work, you identify a few priority learning goals for your work on your cases and in our case team meetings. Therefore, we ask each of you to bring to the first case team meeting a Goal Identification Form, copies of which will be given to you at the end of Orientation, on which you specify some important goals in these areas. Of course you will discover new goals during the semester, and you may achieve or abandon some of your initial goals. We welcome revisions of your goals at any time. Meanwhile, committing goals to writing will help us to emphasize certain aspects of your work as we talk with you over the semester, and it will help you to measure your own progress in the clinic.

    The process of identifying and refining individual goals is a fundamental focus of our work. Explicit concern with goals is an appropriate starting point for almost any enterprise or task. There may be many occasions during the semester when progress on case matters, or on educational matters, requires that you first step back and ask why you are undertaking a particular action.

     The range of goals available to you in the Clinic is vast. The point of identifying some priorities at a very early date is to encourage you to think carefully about exactly what you hope to accomplish through action and reflection on your case work, and to provide a framework for making deliberate, self-conscious choices among competing objectives.

     On the Goal Identification Form, we ask you to focus on general goals concerning your development as a lawyer and a professional. We assume that everyone in the Clinic wants to develop basic practice skills such as interviewing and oral advocacy. The Form allows you to specify two or three of these skills for emphasis, if possible, but you will have opportunities in the Clinic to gain some experience in all of these basic skills areas. In addition, we ask you to state a few "personal professional learning goals," and to identify factors that might inhibit you from achieving them.

    To define your personal professional learning goals for the term, you might try to step back from yourself and assess how you need to grow or change to become as successful professionally as you would like to be.

     The task of selecting a small number of personal learning goals may prove very difficult. We have included, as the Attachment to this Chapter, a partial list of possible personal professional learning goals. It is intended to stimulate your imagination, and to help you realize the array of possible activities open to you this semester. We hope you will use it, not as an exhaustive checklist from which to select, but as a spur to your own creativity. We would also like to be clear that we regard the goals you specify on your forms to be only those goals that, in your view, merit particular emphasis -- not the exclusive agenda for your activities.