Building a (self) reflective muscle in diverse first year law students

Research relating to the development of law students’ professional identity has long recognised that, as a student develops their identity as part of a profession, as well as their academic identity, they need to develop an ethical muscle. At its foundation, this means that rather than focussing on identifying individual ethical issues, people need to practice how to deal with ethical issues within a workplace through gaining a range of skills. It is a practice-based approach to dealing with ethical issues. In addition to the idea of an ethical muscle, others have proposed that students and lawyers need to develop a ‘reflective muscle’. A ‘reflective muscle’ is a term used by Leering to encapsulate the importance of teaching students and legal practitioners to engage regularly in reflection to improve their competence through reflection on practice, and learning from practice. While Leering is the first to use this term, the recognition of the importance of reflection skills is broadly acknowledged as being essential for legal practitioners so that they can continuously build their skills and understandings of the law, legal system and their role within it. Self-reflection, a form of personal reflection that asks students to question themselves, their actions, and behaviours, is an important self-management tool for both law students and lawyers. The development of a self-reflective muscle is particularly important for ‘diverse’ students as they transition to law school. These students are commonly described in the academic literature as ‘non-traditional’ or ‘non-standard’ students, 6 usually because they do not fit the profile of a ‘traditional student’; one who has entered university directly from high school, and whose sociocultural background means that they are more familiar with the implicit norms of university culture