Clinical teaching

Abstract

Students have little hesitation in telling us what does and what does not help them to learn in clinical settings. Repeatedly, student evaluations of their clinical learning experience leave teachers in no doubt that their involvement with students, the support they give, the confidence they can engender, the clinical expertise they model and the knowledge they share, are important to students’ clinical learning (Windsor, 1987). Clinical teachers express a need for guidance in assisting students to apply their own knowledge to problems in practice that are real and individual. Teachers also know that what students are seeing and doing in clinical work can often remain at a superficial level of practice unless they are stimulated to analyse and synthesize their observations and to question the meaning of their experience and its implications for future experiences. In this respect clinical teaching is so far removed from classroom teaching that teachers confronted by the complexity of the task are often bewildered and anxious, or alternatively, paralysed into inactivity and passive supervision.