Teaching context and philosophy

I have two teaching contexts in my role.

In my primary role, I’m a clinical educator of final-year, pre-registration optometrists, supervising their patient care in our on-campus clinic. In the discipline of optometry, pre-registration training begins with years of preclinical learning along with technical skill acquisition, and culminates with supervised practice in a variety of contexts.

The role of a clinical educator is layered. Firstly, the clinical educator must mentor and guide their students to logically analyse and correctly manage each patient presentation. I scaffold my students’ learning by prompting and questioning rather than simply telling. I ask my students to trust, but validate. They should trust the previous optometrist’s diagnosis, trust themselves, trust me, trust the patient, trust the results, but validate: use a critical mind to validate that all of those things are accurate and true. Clinical care often involves ambiguity, and so teaching my students to learn to sit with that feeling is part of the process.

I do my best to demonstrate evidence-based practice, to help students find good quality evidence for clinical questions, and to be patient-centred. I make my thinking visible as much as possible.

I believe that students learn best when they are empowered to make clinical decisions, and are not afraid of their supervisors. I think fear inhibits clear thinking and deep learning. For a student optometrist, examining a patient is already stressful, and so I try to be encouraging and kind, while still maintaining high expectations, to allow students to show me their best. 

The second layer of the clinical educator’s role is to inspire in our students a passion for the joy to be found in our profession, and the need for lifelong learning and professional development in the context of evidence-based practice. Because proficient and expert levels of clinical competency are usually only achieved after graduation, and because in clinical care, the evidence base is constantly evolving, students should be coached to develop an inquiring mind so that, after graduation, they may become proficient or expert, and stay current in their understanding of the evidence base, so that patient care is at its best.

In my secondary role, I teach into the preclinical part of the Master of Clinical Optometry program, and I value being able to contribute to preparing students well, not only for their supervised interactions with patients while studying, but for their eventual entrance into the profession.