Observing Role Models Research Articles

Where have all the preceptors gone? Erosion of the volunteer clinical faculty.

Recruitment of volunteer clinical faculty to teach in undergraduate medical education has become increasingly difficult. More recruitment phone calls are being made with fewer yields (20:1 ratio at our institution this year), while more preceptors are discontinuing their teaching. One of our preceptors recently said, “The way managed care is going, we don't have enough time to spend with our patients, and it is frustrating to have a student in the practice when we have no time to explain what we are doing. So for now, we are going to have to decline being preceptors.” If this trend continues, it will undermine medical schools' capacity to offer important learning experiences to 1st- and 2nd-year medical students. Such experiences offer students experiential learning opportunities to observe role models in action, practice clinical skills, and recognize the relevance of the basic sciences knowledge to clinical practice. Are these preceptors and learning experiences endangered species? The accompanying article by Vath and colleagues suggests that while not yet extinct, volunteer clinical faculty members are declining in number. Their findings are particularly troubling because preceptors in HMO settings and in urban practices are the most likely groups to stop teaching. These are also the most sought-after groups of preceptors because of their proximity to campuses.

The REAL Team: A Cooperative Student Training Program in Rapid Ecological Assessment

iology educators increasingly recognize that students learn concepts most successfully through acombination of hands-on experience, cooperative problemsolving, and independent study (Batchelder and Root 1994,Thorley and Gregory 1994,Herreid 1998).Students who areexploring careers in the biological sciences can experience thedaily practice of professionals through a burgeoning numberof internships, which are usually separate from their coursework.However, academic programs that integrate servicelearning with formal classroom study are relatively uncom-mon in the biological sciences,except in certain health or pre-medical curricula (Kelly 1995), agricultural extension pro-grams (Rilla and Ponzio 1994), and environmental studiesdepartments (Kaufman and Zeigler 1993, Touval and Dietz1994,Ward and Zotlowski 1999).We describe one such program in which rigorous coursework at the University of Connecticut prepared a group of stu-dents for a subsequent 10-week summer internship at a non-profit institution, the Connecticut chapter of The NatureConservancy (TNC). Called the REAL Team, for rapid eco-logical assessment of the landscape, this program trainedstudents in both broad ecological concepts and specific tax-onomic skills,knowledge that they could then apply to theirwork with a conservation organization.Instead of crowdingan internship and classroom instruction into a single se-mester,the program spanned a spring semester of academicstudy and a subsequent summer-long appointment to a pro-fessional project.We found that this program offers many ed-ucational benefits to students, strengthens cooperation be-tween academic and professional institutions, and providesan adaptable model for the development of similar programselsewhere.In recent reviews, service-learning programs that haveevolved within university curricula have been critically ex-amined for the ways in which these ambitious projects fos-ter both professional and academic learning. Students benefit from service-learning projects in many ways: directlyapplying classroom concepts to real-world problems, ob-serving professional role models,developing a sense of placeby contributing to their local community,honing teamworkskills, and adopting efficient time management in meetingdeadlines (Dillon and Van Riper 1993).However,ambitiousprojects also carry the risk of failure for students and facultycoordinators and can entail substantial supervision on the partof both the academic and extramural partners.A semester of16 weeks or less is a very brief time in which to identify an ap-propriately scaled project; establish and maintain smoothcollaboration among students and their host agency; anddeliver a tangible product that meets the needs of the educator,agency, and students (Hornig 1999). The host agency mustevaluate the net worth of the work the students producewith respect to the time invested by its own employees in as-sisting students with their project.In addition,such a programcan be sustained only if it is an integral part of the depart-mental curriculum and supported by the academic partner’sinfrastructure with sufficient budget allocations for the ap-propriate courses (Korfmacher 1999).

Provisional Selves: Experimenting with Image and Identity in Professional Adaptation

This article describes how people adapt to new roles by experimenting with provisional selves that serve as trials for possible but not yet fully elaborated professional identities. Qualitative data collected from professionals in transition to more senior roles reveal that adaptation involves three basic tasks: (1) observing role models to identify potential identities, (2) experimenting with provisional selves, and (3) evaluating experiments against internal standards and external feedback. Choices within tasks are guided by an evolving repertory that includes images about the kind of professional one might become and the styles, skills, attitudes, and routines available to the person for constructing those identities. A conceptual framework is proposed in which individual and situational factors influence adaptation behaviors indirectly by shaping the repertory of possibilities that guides self-construction.