Teaching and Learning in Clinical Education

I am writing this blog as I have scarce few active patients at the moment and the evaluations that come in are directed toward my athletic training students. My position is a multifaceted one and I consider my roll as a preceptor to be as important as my roll as a health care provider. I have always been a teacher, I was originally trained in secondary health and physical education and philosophy as an undergraduate at Southern Oregon University, studied coaching sciences at the University of British Columbia, have been a coach at every level from youth to post-collegiate since 2007, and have presented at coaching conferences. However, my understanding of what it means to teach has grown immensely since becoming a preceptor, often in stark contrast to my experience as an student.

Much of my experience, and seemingly that of many athletic training students I encounter, includes preceptors that seem to view their world as if it were the emergency department at Highland Hospital in Oakland California after the Loma Prieta earthquake. A place where the hours are grueling, the job thankless, the work difficult, and of life or death importance (of course we all know this can be true, but not on a minute to minute basis). Add to that mixture a large number of people who are largely underpaid and either hate their jobs or are disenchanted with their careers, and you have a less than an ideal learning environment for the training of new generations of professionals. Preceptors often see it as a right of passage, an earned position, to be their athletic training student. This often leaves students, who are already concerned about making mistakes, in a position to be even more worried about the casual misstep in an evaluation, or the choosing of a treatment that might differ from their preceptor's patient care philosophy. It is my goal to improve this state of affairs in whatever small way I might, starting with how I teach and treat my athletic training students.

In my experience, people learn equally well from both success and setback. As a student in a professional program, experience and necessity will teach more than any lecture. Under a watchful eye I have attempted to turn my clinical practice into what I hope is a robust teaching and learning environment by allowing my athletic training students to shoulder as much of the workload, for all non-urgent or emergency situations, as they can feasibly handle in a manner that I hope feels as if I am treating them like colleagues to be mentored rather than students to be lectured and berated. This coupled with a schedule that allows for adequate daily planning and debriefing, question, answer, demonstration, and practice prior to and following patient care appears to allow students time to process successes and setbacks in their patient care leading to growth and learning.

It will be interesting to reflect on how this clinical education philosophy grows and evolves over time as I continue as a preceptor. Perhaps I have been on the receiving end of talented and competent students thus far without reason to control my environment more closely. Perhaps I have learned from my experiences, both positive and negative, to create an environment conducive to learning as an athletic training student. I am certain however that if I continue to treat my students more like colleagues, the benefits to my clinical practice will be many and I will also never stop learning.