Clinical Teaching in Dental Education : To Facilitate a Clinical Clerkship

This review focuses on the clinical teaching in dental education in terms of facilitating clinical clerkship. Most of the faculty in dental school has major responsibility in clinical teaching. However, they have never been trained. This is the serious problem in Japanese dental education. Recently, the idea of faculty development prevails in higher education. Health professions' education is also one of the important academic areas to be acquired by a clinical teacher, but it is not successful. Clinical teaching is pretty different from usual education in the classroom. The important difference is an additional new point of view, which is "patient", though usual education depends on the relationship between learners and teachers. To understand the new framework, it is necessary to clear the role of learners and teachers. The role of teacher could be summarized as "Expert", "Formal authority", "Socializing agent", "Role model", "Facilitator" and "Coordinate person". On the other hand, learner needs to possess "Self establishment", "Eagerness for learning", "Deep approach in thinking" and "Meta-cognitive skill". We, as a clinical teacher, should understand their variety of roles and make good use of them in clinical teaching. Learners are more than twenty-years old, so the idea of andragogy should be applied, which is the major theory of adult learning. And appropriate educational environment which ensures their safely learning should also be constructed. These ideas are the core of clinical teaching to facilitate proper clinical clerkship. It is important to keep them improving in terms of evidence-based education