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Growing

This final week  is about growing as a clinical faculty member and also observing and learning about the problems so improvements can be made. When I read through the article on North American Dental Students’ Perspectives About Their Clinical Education I thought it sounded a lot like my own school experiences. Some faculty are good, others are not. Some patient encounters were meaningful and inspiring and some made me want to cry. I also felt that there are some things that were too big for me to change myself….like I can’t change the faculty that are unenthusiastic……and I don’t have the power to change the requirement systems. But the article did make me want to be one of those “remarkable” “knowledgeable” “committed” faculty that the students commented on. So even though it may not be perfect, I still think that I can make a difference in the clinical education of students. This is what inspired me to get into teaching in the first place. I was inspired by the good faculty and disappointed in the not so good faculty. It made me want to be one of the good ones for future students. Clinical instruction is hard work, but rewarding. You have the ability to influence a students’ clinical skills is  way that no one else will in the future.
Blog Post 13 (Last One!):  I want you to pretend you are a clinical instructor right now. What is one thing you would focus on to make yourself a great clinical instructor? What things are you able to do to make a great educational experience for students?
Have fun, be creative. I look forward to reading your answers.

Ethics and Liability in Clinical Teaching

This week covers protecting yourself as a clinical faculty member. Hopefully the reading brought up some things that you might not have been aware of before, such as malpractice coverage, program policies, and privacy of students information. Honestly I never really worried about these things until I read this chapter! If you are looking to take a job as a clinical instructor chapter 10 can give you some insight into the types of questions you may want to ask an employer when considering a position. Clinical instruction is a rewarding and worthwhile career, even if you only do it a day or half day a week. Working with students not only allows you to influence the future of the profession, but also allows you to revisit the basics and stay up on current philosophies in dental hygiene. Blog Post 12: So let’s say that you have been offered a position as a clinical instructor at a dental hygiene program. You are really excited for this new opportunity. What are the two things that you are most concerned about? Why are you concerned about these issues. What more would you want to know before starting a position as a clinical instructor? Hopefully some of you will find yourself in this situation soon, and you never know when you’ll have to look back at all the things you have learned in your career.

Diversity

 

This week you read a chapter in HCT on managing student diversity. Some may argue that dental hygiene is not a very diverse field and why would we need to cover this topic. And that argument does have some weight. Statistics from ADHA report that:

 

Dental Hygiene Students are:
97% female
88.6% non-Hispanic white*
*ADHA Dental Hygiene Education Program Director Survey 2008, ADHA.

 

A considerable proportion of students enter dental hygiene after working or pursuing education in another field.

 

The statistics show that dental hygiene as a whole lacks diversity. Keep in mind that when we discuss diversity it is not just about ethnicity; it includes gender, age, etc. Blog Post 11: I want you to answer the question from the Access article, What does diversity mean to you? Why do you think dental hygiene lacks diversity? What suggestions do you have for increasing diversity in dental hygiene?

 

Faculty Calibration

Now we are getting into some of the more difficult issues surrounding clinical instruction. The topic this week is Faculty Calibration. This is a never ending issues within dental hygiene programs because each of us as an instructor are different. We all have strengths and weaknesses in certain areas. It is difficult to get a group of people to react the same way to every situation when not all situations can be predicted.

apples

Apple photo. Flickr: MSR. Creative Commons license.

 

When I read the article  “Moving Toward Clinical Faculty Calibration” by Mary Jacks I definitely had a reaction to it. I’m not going to tell you what my reaction was just yet, but I do want to know what yours was. Blog Post 10: after reading the article, post your reaction to the article. Do you agree with the article, do you disagree and why? Looking forward to reading your responses.

 

Accreditation

Accreditation is crucial to a dental hygiene program. Dental hygiene programs go through the accreditation process every seven years. As a clinical instructor, sometimes accreditation seems like an issue that is distant from your role. But clinical instruction and how it is done is an essential part of the accreditation process. Your reading assignment highlighted some of the accreditation standards that are more pertinent to clinical instructors. Hopefully as you read through the accreditation documents you learned some new things. When I first went through them there were several things that surprised and confused me. I also began to realize why we do some of the things the way we do. Looking at these articles is really getting into the “behind the scenes” of dental hygiene clinical education. Blog Post 9: I want you to write about what surprised you the most in your readings this week.  Was there something in the documents that you were unaware of or was there something that explained a certain procedure or policy in your clinics? Write about those items and describe why you found them to be surprising, interesting, or intriguing.

Giving Feedback and Grading

One of the hardest things to do as a faculty member is to grade. Giving someone a grade is a lot harder than it sounds. Giving good grades is easy, you are always pleased to reward a student for a job well done. It’s the lower grades that cause the problem. I do not like to give failing grades, and when I first started clincial teaching I don’t think I gave any at all. With more experience I have learned that giving students good grades just because it is a little uncomfortable to give them a lower grade DOES NOT help the student learn anything. Some of the best learning experiences come from times when faculty really critically evaluate the student’s performance.

Blog Post8:  I would like you to read the following scenarios and respond to the questions at the end. Don’t forget to try to incorporate some of the things in your readings into your responses:

 

#1 You are working with several students in the dental hygiene clinic. Mary (for lack of a better name) comes to you and checks in the patient’s medical history and vital signs with you. Mary is a good student and always seems to be on the ball in clinic. She has a good attitude and has developed great rapport with her patients. She indicates that the patient had a total knee replacement six months ago and that he has hypertension, which is controlled by medicaiton. Mary tellls you that the vitals signs are normal and shows you the readings which are all within normal range. She then proceeds to ask you to sign for radiographs and wants to begin her periodontal assessments. As the instructor you are concerned that she has not asked about an antibiotic prophylaxis for the joint replacement. How will you approach this with her and what grade and feedback should she get from you?

 

 

#2 Today has not gone well for you. You forgot your phone on your kitchen table, you only slept 4 hours last night and when you got into clinic you realized that you put your scrub top on inside out……..and it is not a reversible scrub top. The clinic is full and you are the only instructor and two students have added on to the clinic. You know it’s going to be one of those crazy days. But you love working with students so you are up for the challenge. Clinic rolls along quite well because you have excellent organizational and time management skills. Your student, Ben, asks you to check his scaling which he has completed. Using good questioning skills you ask him, “How did the scaling go?” He says he thinks it went really well, he only had a little trouble with some crowding in the lower anteriors but he feels confident that everything is good. As you begin to check you come across…one…….two…..three………………………..seven pieces of readily detectable calculus. How will you handle this situation? What grade will you give Ben?

Competency Evaluations

This week’s reading is about creating good competency evaluations. Believe it or not there is a science to designing those forms that you were evaluated on in pre-clinic and clinic. When it comes to using competencies to evaluate students there are some issues that always seem to come up. The first issue is should a student know that you are completing the evaluation at that time. There is a type of thought that says instructors should evaluate students in a clinical setting while they do not know the competency is being completed. The second issue is if a first year student passes a competency should they have to repeat that same competency several more times during their last year of school? Or should they be deemed competent based on the one determination of competency. The final issue is the fact that students become very nervous during competency exams (if they know they are being evaluated) and sometimes perform poorly just due to being nervous. These issues are all issues I have struggled with as a clinical instructor, and I’m not sure I have decided what the best answer is yet.

Blog Post 7: I’d like to think about all that you have learned so far in this class and previous education classes and come up with answers to the following questions:
1. Should students know they are being evaluated? Why or why not?
2. Should students have to pass competencies more than once? Why or why not?
3. What strategies could instructors use to help students who are incredibly nervous during a competency exam?
You are going to have to use some of your own experiences and previous knowledge to answer these questions. The reading this week is more about how to actually write the competency and we will practice that, but I think these 3 questions are related to competencies and will be good for discussion. Remember to think of these problems from an educator’s perspective, although your experience as a student will help here too. There is not right or wrong answer, just be sure to support your answer.

Coaching and Role Modeling

 

Faculty Checking Student

Photo courtesy of the OSU Division of Dental Hygiene, College of Dentistry

Teaching by role modeling is a great way for student’s to learn, especially in a clinical setting. Ideally you should display the behavior or actions that you want your students to immitate. As far as character, demeanor, ethics, etc. I think this is a great way to teach these things. As far as technical skills go, this can be a little trickier. For example once hygienists are in private practice for a while they develop some of their own techniques that are not according to the textbook. Sometimes they share these techniques with students or students observe them using these techniques. Blog Post 6: I want you to answer the following questions. Should clinical faculty only reinforce what is taught in classes or textbooks? Do these modifications have a place in clinical teaching? How could a clinical faculty member introduce different techniques without negating what students were taught in the classroom or pre-clinic? Looking forward to reading your responses.

Questioning Skills

Question mark

Question mark. Photograph by Stefano Bertolotti. Taken Jan 23 2010.Creative Commons License.

Questioning skills are important in order to foster critical thinking and problem solving in the dental hygiene clinic. Questioning does have somewhat of an art component to it also. Questioning is an art. As a clinical instructor you have to be sure to choose the right time, the right tone, ask the right questions, and avoid making the student feel too nervous but yet still understand that you are asking them questions to help them learn. When I first started teaching I was very guilty of asking questions that give away the answer. For example:
“That blood pressure is kind of high huh?”
“Do you think you should try your universal curet?”
“Did you ask the patient if he has hot or cold sensitivity?”
As I learned more about teaching, especially in a clinical setting, I learned that I needed to be more purposeful about the questions that I ask students. Since then, I make a conscious effort to ask good questions when I’m working with students in the clinic. I do sometimes ask “bad” questions, but I now can recognize those questions and correct my errors. Even the greatest clinical instructor doesn’t ask the right questions every time, but it is a skill you have to work on to be good at.

Blog Post 5:
While checking in the intra/extra oral exam you notice a lesion on the buccal mucosa. The student has not mentioned it to you and you have not looked at the intra/extra oral exam page yet. What question do you ask and why do you ask that question? What follow up questions might you ask? Remember to follow the principles introduced in the readings and discuss how your questions follow those principles.