Rural doctors are naturally effective teachers

Abstract

ABSTRACT: As part of a larger project, the authors observed the teaching of nine rural doctors in rural centres in southern Queensland. The observations were designed to provide data about the realities of teaching and learning in rural settings, so that they could be used to refine an existing model which described effective clinical teaching in hospital settings. Once refined, the model is to form the foundation of a video‐based rural teaching resource kit for use in rural general practice and hospital settings. While the observation strategy was excellent in serving the wider purpose, the observations also revealed important information about effective teaching per se. Essentially, rural practitioner—teachers in the sample were very effective facilitators of quality learning,1 despite their lack of formal teacher education. This paper reports the characteristics of their effective teaching, taken from a synthesis of the observation data. The proposition is that a great deal about effective teaching can be learnt from them. A second, broader proposition is that there are implications for those who seek to provide teacher education for medical teachers in all situations.