Variation in clinical educators’ understanding of being an expert clinical educator: a phenomenographic study

Being a clinical educator in real-practice settings is an important role adopted by many allied heath clinicians, enabling pre-qualifying students to develop the professional capabilities and work-readiness needed for practice. Although there are some characteristics and impacts associated with what clinical educator expertise looks like, developmental trajectories of clinical educators and what it takes to develop this expertise are unknown. Using a phenomenographic approach, we investigated the qualitatively different ways that allied health clinical educators understand what being an expert clinical educator means. We interviewed a diverse sample of clinical educators and analysed their critically different ways of understanding and the relationships between these ways of understanding. Eighteen clinical educators participated, representing 7 allied health disciplines. Four distinct ways of understanding ‘being an expert clinical educator’ were constituted. These were: (i) Teaching professional skills; (ii) Managing learning activity; (iii) Facilitating learning responsively; and (iv) Partnering with learners. These ways of understanding are differentiated by varying levels of awareness of 16 dimensions of what it means to be an expert clinical educator, which were arranged into four thematic groupings: (i) Role of the clinical educator; (ii) Understanding of students; (iii) Understanding of how students learn and (iv) Desired outcomes. These findings offer unique knowledge about how clinical educators understand what it means to be an expert clinical educator, and highlights how some understandings are limited in complexity. This knowledge is valuable for shaping the design of educator learning programs, policy frameworks and the recognition of clinical educator capabilities.