Instinctive Clinical Teaching: Erasing the Mental Boundary Between Clinical Education and Patient Care to Promote Natural Learning

Abstract

Effective clinical teaching is essential in physician education, yet faculty members rarely receive formal training in clinical teaching. Formal models for training clinical educators are often tedious and require significant time and effort. Instinctive clinical teaching allows clinicians to seamlessly integrate and promote effective teaching into their clinical practice. The approach is guided by similarities between the components of Kolb's experiential learning cycle—concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation—and the elements of the patient care process—history and physical, initial assessment, differential, hypothesis, final diagnosis, management, and follow-up. Externalization of these clinical thought processes allows for inclusion of learners and promotes effective clinical teaching.