Teaching the Teacher: Enhancing Clinical Educators’ Supervisory Skills Using Interprofessional Clinical Educator Workshops
Purpose:
To describe the relationship between clinical educators’ attendance at interprofessional workshops and clinical supervision skills.
Description:
Faculty from nursing, occupational, physical and speech therapy provided annual interprofessional workshops in clinical supervision skills for clinical educators for five years. To incentivize attendance, contact hours for license renewal were acquired from professional regulatory boards and there was no registration fee. Workshop themes were creative; topics, which changed yearly, were from contemporary practice such as ethics, emotional intelligence, generational differences, supervision models, and feedback methods. The format was day-long and face-to-face. Presenters varied instructional strategies: lecture with power point, role playing and discussion including Kahoot, an electronic interactive platform. Clinical educators were seated with colleagues from each profession to encourage interprofessional education, discussion and problem-solving during student case analysis and larger discussion.
Summary of Use:
Sixty-four clinical educators were identified as having attended one or more workshops held from 2014-2017. At the fifth annual workshop they were asked to complete a descriptive questionnaire and a Qualtrics Survey which included a Likert Scale via on-line and on-site administration. 97% of the clinical educators who responded indicated that “new knowledge was obtained” and that this new information contributed “somewhat or considerably to their supervision performance.” The dominant theme emerging from the qualitative data was that the clinical educators experienced “personal and professional growth” which “enhanced their supervisory skills.” Secondary themes that arose were the formation of relationships with their students and enhanced interprofessional collaborative practice (IPCP). These outcomes demonstrate that interprofessional workshops positively influenced clinical educators’ supervisory performance through acquisition of new knowledge and knowledge translation into their professional practice.
Importance to Members:
The need for effective techniques to develop physical therapy clinical educators and to enhance their clinical supervision skills is increasingly important: learning to be a teacher in the clinic is a required element for entry level DPT Programs per CAPTE Standards. Health professional researchers have attempted to identify beneficial training programs from on-line learning with nurses to the use of a summative tool across the disciplines; the evidence is inconclusive. The APTA Clinical Instructor Credentialing Program assists the physical therapy profession with this important task. Interprofessional workshops that emphasize contemporary topics of interest to clinical educators offered in a creative and interactive format show initial promise: supervisory skills, relationships with students and interprofessional collaborative practice are all enhanced. These workshops may ultimately contribute to effective physical therapy clinical supervision skill and complement the existing APTA Clinical Instructor Credentialing Program.