Clinical teaching in physical therapy education. An ethnographic study

The purpose of this ethnographic study was to examine the process of clinical education from the viewpoint of clinical teachers. A three-month field study based on a grounded theory approach and involving simultaneous collection and codification of data led to the discovery and explication of two major components of the clinical education process. One component, the clinical teaching situation, identified the organizational and human factors that influence the type, quality, and quantity of the student learning. The second component, teaching tools used by the clinical teachers, identified the strategies used to pace the student to professional competence. The authors view the findings as a beginning understanding of how and why clinical education is fundamentally different from academic education.