Clinical Supervisor Evaluations by Students: Improving Quality and Utility for Educators

Although there are excellent sources of guidance for clinical supervisors seeking to write accurate and effective narrative clinical evaluations of clinical students, there is little guidance available for students to write high-quality narrative evaluations of supervisors. Without clear guidelines, students may comment on personality traits instead of on clinical teaching skills, or worse-they may document content that includes overt or implicit bias or narrative that is written in an unprofessional manner. Fortunately, there is a wealth of literature on the attributes of excellent clinical teachers that can guide students writing evaluations of clinical supervisors. We propose a model for teaching the writing of efficient, effective, structured narrative evaluations of supervisors based on the extensive literature on the skills and attributes of excellent clinical teachers. The PEARLS+ model prompts students to comment in the following areas: a positive learning environment, clinical expertise, enthusiasm for the subject matter, setting clear expectations, providing appropriate levels of supervision and autonomy, role modelling of communication skills and professionalism, listening to learner needs and providing specific feedback. It also prompts the student to provide constructive commentary on an aspect of clinical teaching the supervisor could work on to be even more effective. Implementation of this model for clinical supervisor evaluations has the potential to be an important contributor to clinical teaching development efforts. By focusing feedback on specific areas important for teaching excellence, individual supervisors and their supporting institutions will be able to more precisely identify relative areas of strengths and weaknesses and plan corrective actions as indicated.