JCPSLP Vol 23 No 3

Creative clinical education

Top 10 Tips and tricks for creative clinical education Simone Howells, Lucy Lyons, Rebecca Armstrong, and Anne Hill

3 Engage in communities of practice Communities of practice have their origins in learning in a social context and creating meaning through engaging with like-minded people. These can be virtual/online (like SPICE, mentioned at the start of this article) or in person. Are you already a member of a community of practice? Consider ways you can engage in such a community in your work context about clinical education. For example, you could establish a “tips and tricks” email chat, a lunch-time catch-up or a more formal discussion such as journal club or resource-sharing. Building your ideas and sharing collective creative wisdom and innovations in clinical education with colleagues will support you to be the best clinical educator you can be for your students. 4 Engage students in telehealth services There has been a rapid increase in the delivery of speech pathology services via telehealth with a subsequent impact on clinical education. The Speech Pathology Australia website provides access to free online training webinars and resources relating to telehealth (https://www. speechpathologyaustralia.org.au/SPAweb/Resources_for_ Speech_Pathologists/Professional_Resources/HTML/ Telepractice_Resources.aspx?hkey=311bddee-3dd1-43a2- 8a88-6b0189f71d12). As a start, you could direct your students to these resources to prepare them for delivering services via telehealth. Students can also be tasked with creating workplace guides on navigating technology, if these do not already exist. It is also important to manage student expectations in relation to telehealth service delivery. For example, have conversations early about the educator’s role during a telehealth session and models for the provision of feedback after a session. You can also encourage students to establish their own online support groups and networks (e.g., via WhatsApp) so that they can share tips and resources with each other across placement sites. 5 Offer student placements in models that suit you and your workplace Different service delivery models provide opportunities for creativity with student placements. These models of delivery can range from observational visits to direct delivery of services, including provision of one-to-one or group intervention, or camp-style models allowing for implementation of more intensive services. Experiences can extend to coaching or running professional development events, creating educational resources, or delivering case presentations. Allowing students to observe sessions (recordings or in real time) also provides opportunities for skill development. These different models and opportunities can be scaffolded with support from the clinical educator,

C OVID-19 has impacted on the provision of clinical education since 2020. Here are our top tips and tricks to maximise your time and limit burden while providing creative clinical education. 1 Access the wisdom and resources of interprofessional colleagues While there is a wealth of information about clinical education in speech pathology, we can also draw upon the expertise and practices in other disciplines when seeking creative clinical education ideas, tips, and tricks for our own practice. For example, the ClinEdAus website (https://www. clinedaus.org.au/) boasts a raft of clinical education resources applicable for a range of health disciplines, including information about innovative placement and supervision models, and templates for student learning. Engaging with interprofessional colleagues about clinical education is also a useful strategy for sharing ideas, collaboratively solving problems, and identifying new ways of doing things in speech pathology. What opportunities are there in your workplace to chat with colleagues about how they do clinical education in their discipline? 2 Encourage students to teach each other Staying with the interprofessional theme, students can be powerful teachers within discipline and multidisciplinary teams. When supervising multiple students at once (e.g., paired or group placements), try to facilitate dedicated peer feedback sessions. Encourage students to give each other structured, specific feedback in a growth-developing and non-judgemental manner (such as using the “stop, start, keep” framework). You can also foster student teaching within multidisciplinary student teams. Why not have your student observe a student from another discipline providing patient care and practise giving them feedback on their professional skills? Facilitating multidisciplinary student tutorials is another great way for students to learn about other professions on placement, and develop skills in communication, negotiation and reasoning while working through a hypothetical case-based scenario. Simone, Lucy, Rebecca and Anne are speech pathologists employed in university and health care settings. Together they have initiated SPICE: Speech Pathologists with an Interest in Clinical Education . SPICE is an online community of practice to enable speech pathologists with an interest in working with students and new graduates to share ideas, resources and tips relating to clinical education. You can join SPICE here: https://groups.io/g/SPICE.

Top to bottom: Simone Howells, Lucy Lyons, Rebecca Armstrong, and Anne Hill

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JCPSLP Volume 23, Number 3 2021

Journal of Clinical Practice in Speech-Language Pathology