Faculty development for clinical instructors in allied health: an inservice approach

Allied health faculty in the clinical setting are traditionally practitioners with both service and teaching responsibilities. Much effort is expended on ensuring quality performance by the practitioner in his or her health care specialty with little emphasis on the faculty member's preparation for teaching. This article describes an inservice program designed to provide applied teaching techniques for clinical faculty members faced with such a situation. The inservice program addresses four areas of interest to clinical faculty: orientation to the educational process, development and implementation of behavioral objective, selection of the most effective clinical teaching method, and evaluation of student clinical performance. The effectiveness of the inservice program in meeting its objectives was estimated by use of gain scores between pre- and posttest performance.