Clinical Teaching
Overview
You didn’t step into clinical education to feel stretched thin between managing a full patient caseload, balancing documentation, and wondering if your teaching is truly helping students learn and grow. You chose to teach because you want to mentor the next generation of healthcare professionals—helping learners bridge theory to practice, develop sound clinical reasoning, and deliver exceptional patient care. Yet somewhere along the way, the daily demands of clinical practice can make teaching feel overwhelming.
Here’s what we know: clinical education challenges aren’t new, and ever-evolving practice environments only make the balancing act more difficult. Whether you are welcoming your first student or have been a clinical teacher for decades, this reality presents an incredible opportunity to step back and explore what truly drives clinical excellence: How do we facilitate critical thinking at the bedside or in a busy clinic without compromising patient care? How do we connect effectively with today’s learners, navigate the struggling student, and provide constructive feedback that sparks growth? And how do we build learning environments rooted in professionalism, psychological safety, and reflective practice?
We’re inviting you to join a university-wide clinical teaching journey dedicated to supporting our clinical educators at every stage of their journey. Together, we’ll discover practical strategies from efficient bedside teaching and competency-based assessment to interprofessional collaboration and time management equipping you with the tools, community, and confidence to be an exceptional clinical teacher.
Throughout this journey, we’ll dive into the topics that matter most for exceptional clinical teaching:
Elevating Feedback in Clinical Education: Transform student critique into mentoring that promotes student learning on their path toward clinical practice autonomy
Reimagining Student Clinical Assessments: Move beyond subjective grading checklists to develop competency-based evaluations that inform student readiness for independent clinical practice.
High Yield Teaching in Fast Paced Clinical Environments: Master time-efficient micro-teaching techniques that maximize clinical learning without disrupting workflow or compromising patient care.
Strategies to Develop Clinical Reasoning: Utilize think-aloud strategies and targeted questioning to guide learners from basic fact recall to integrated clinical decision making.
The Struggling Learner: Identify root causes of underperformance early, establish objective remediation plans, and provide structured support while maintaining patient safety and program standards.
Professionalism: Model and cultivate essential affective behaviors, ethical accountability, and personal integrity necessary for autonomous clinical practice.
Communication Skills: Coach learners to articulate complex clinical findings clearly to patients and caregivers using structured, empathetic, and culturally responsive dialogue.
Interprofessional Collaboration and Teamwork: Foster the communication and mutual respect required for learners to seamlessly engage, consult, and advocate within multidisciplinary healthcare teams.
Orientation and Goal Setting: Establish mutual expectations and clinical learning objectives on day one to set a clear trajectory for a successful clinical rotation.
Teaching This Generation (Gen Z/Alpha): Adapt mentorship strategies to align with the strengths, digital fluency, and feedback preferences of modern learners without lowering rigorous clinical standards and performance expectations.
Creating Respectful Learning Environments: Build a psychologically safe clinical atmosphere where learners feel supported to ask questions, acknowledge knowledge gaps, and learn from mistakes.
Adult Learning Theory Application: Harness foundational andragogy principles to transition students from passive observers into self-directed, motivated practitioners.
Effective Clinical Presentations: Teach learners to deliver concise, organized, and clinically relevant case summaries that prioritize critical data and diagnostic synthesis.
Reflective Practice Facilitation: Guide students through structured debriefing and critical self-appraisal to turn daily clinical encounters into lifelong professional development lessons.
Time Management in Clinical Teaching: Implement practical strategies to balance high-quality student instruction alongside demanding patient caseloads and administrative responsibilities.
We understand that everyone has varying time commitments and learning preferences, so we’ve designed multiple ways for you to participate in our clinical teaching offerings:
Quick Exploration (30 minutes): Jump into a Teaching Spark—a focused, online session that explores one practical clinical teaching idea you can implement immediately.
Ongoing Learning (Asynchronous): Access our Resource Library (coming soon!) with guides, templates, and tools for clinical teaching, or listen to podcast episodes featuring faculty success stories and practical strategies.
Hands-On Workshops: Join collaborative workshops designed to build specific clinical teaching skills alongside your colleagues.
Fireside Chat (Late Fall): Sit in on an informal conversation with a clinical teaching expert, where you can hear their perspective and ask questions in a low-pressure setting.
Conference Learning: Participate in clinical teaching–focused sessions at Interface, RiTL, and the AI Summit.
Semester Kickoff Symposium (Start of Fall): Attend our Clinical Teaching Symposium to launch the academic year—connect with colleagues across colleges and get an overview of the year’s offerings before diving into any of the options above.
From Critique to Coaching: Elevating Feedback in Clinical Education
Instructor(s): Michael Hodges
9/25/2026 | 12:50 PM – 1:50 PM
Online
Most clinical instructors know the feeling: you spend time giving a student detailed feedback, only to watch them freeze up, get defensive, or make the exact same mistake the next day. Traditional student clinical feedback can often feel like a personal criticism. Coaching, on the other hand, actively builds clinical skills in real time and can have a greater impact on a student’s journey towards clinical autonomy.
This session offers practical strategies to help you shift from simply critiquing student performance to coaching for future clinical independence. Whether you are taking your very first clinical student or have been mentoring learners for decades, this presentation will give you simple, actionable tools to make feedback more productive, less stressful, and far more impactful.
Passport categories: Clinical Assessment and Feedback
Register for From Critique to Coaching: Elevating Feedback in Clinical Education here.
Reimagining Student Clinical Assessments:
Instructor: Michael Hodges, PT, DPT, OCS
10/5/2026 | 1:55 PM – 2:55 PM
Online
Reimagining Student Clinical Assessments: Competency Based Clinical Education and Entrustable Professional Activities
We will explore how ongoing formative assessments during daily clinical tasks clarifies performance expectations, enhances clinical reasoning, and simplifies summative evaluation of student readiness for autonomous clinical practice. Additionally, participants will learn what EPAs look like in clinical encounters as well as how to use entrustment scales to clearly communicate the level of autonomy a learner has earned.
Grading clinical performance often feels like an exercise in subjective guesswork. Traditional clinical assessment tools tend to evaluate generic behaviors or rely on rigid checklists, leaving clinical instructors wondering: When is this student truly ready to handle real-world patient care on their own?
Competency-Based Education (CBE) and Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) offer a practical way forward. Rather than evaluating abstract qualities, EPAs focus on observable, real-world tasks that make up everyday clinical practice giving you a clear, framework to gauge supervision levels and safely transition students toward independent clinical practice.
Passport categories: Clinical Assessment and Feedback
Register for Reimagining Student Clinical Assessments here.
Minutes, Not Hours: High-Yield Teaching in Fast-Paced Clinical Environments
Instructor: Michael Hodges
10/19/2026 | 1:55 PM – 2:55 PM
Online
Balancing a full patient caseload with dedicated clinical teaching often feels impossible. When clinic schedules run tight and as documentation piles up, high-quality instruction is usually the first thing squeezed out. The good news is that impactful clinical teaching doesn’t require hour-long instruction—it can happen in targeted bursts of 60 to 90 seconds throughout the day.
This session delivers practical, time-tested teaching models designed to help you extract maximum learning value from routine patient encounters while reducing the likelihood of getting behind on your schedule. Whether you practice in an acute care setting, an outpatient clinic, or anywhere in between, you’ll walk away with simple tools to teach effectively “on the fly” without sacrificing patient care or clinic productivity.
Passport categories: Clinical Teaching Effectiveness
Register for Minutes, Not Hours: High-Yield Teaching in Fast-Paced Clinical Environments here.
Making Thinking Visible: Strategies to Develop Student Clinical Reasoning
Instructor: Michael Hodges
11/9/2026 | 1:55 PM – 2:55 PM
Online
When a student struggles with clinical decision-making, it is rarely due to a lack of background knowledge—it is usually a breakdown in how they process, prioritize, and connect clinical information in real time. Because experienced clinicians make decisions largely through intuitive pattern recognition, explaining how we think to a student can be one of the toughest challenges in clinical education.
This session will explore evidence-based methods to externalize internal clinical thought processes, helping students move beyond passive observation to active, structured problem-solving. Strategies will be provided to make clinical reasoning explicit, diagnose learner thinking gaps, and guide students toward independent, reflective clinical practice.
Passport categories: Clinical Teaching Effectiveness
Register for Making Thinking Visible: Strategies to Develop Student Clinical Reasoning here.