should be done with caution and a number of caveats, on balance it offers an
approach that has the capacity to strengthen teaching and teacher education.
10.2 Conceptualising Clinical Practice for Teaching
The past decade has seen an amplified interest within education research and policy
in the notion of‘clinical practice’as it relates to teaching and teacher education
(Burn and Mutton 2013 ). Most discussions about clinical teaching have centred on
the education of pre-service teachers, and characteristics of particular programs
which self-identify as clinical (e.g. Conroy et al. 2013 ; McLean Davies et al. 2013 ;
Burn and Mutton 2013 ). Central to these programs is the close connection between
theory and practice, sustained and substantive time spent in clinical sites and the
explicit development of pre-service teachers’capacity to make evidence-informed
judgments. In these ways, these programs appropriate and adapt a model of medical
education to the school education context. While program-based research is
important in advancing an understanding of the enactment of clinical judgment and
clinical practice, it is also imperative to advance thinking regarding the conceptual
frameworks underpinning notions of clinical teaching that are made possible
through clinical practice models. Research and scholarship has also directed
attention to this process of adapting a model of medical education for teacher
education, and the affordances and complexities of this in terms of conceptualising
the way teachers conceive their work with students and advance learning (Alter and
Coggshall 2009 ; Kriewaldt and Turnidge 2013 ; McLean Davies et al. 2015 ). This
chapter builds on this conceptual work, and presents a framework for understanding
the central tenets of clinical teaching and their interrelationship; these extend
beyond the pre-service phase and can be understood as the basis of a broader
conceptualisation that framesallteachers’work as having a clinical foundation.
That is, clinical teaching is not just about a model of teacher preparation, but rather,
is an approach that encompasses and informs teacher practice on a daily basis.
Central to the medical professional’s thinking is that all decisions must be made
with an overriding concern for the best interests of the person whose health or
well-being is charged to their care. In education, we argue that this translates into a
clinical model of teaching that has the following features:
- The student and their learning needs are pivotal to all decision-making about
what, when and how to teach; - The teacher uses evidence about the student, what they already know and what
they are ready to learn to make decisions about subsequent teaching; - The teacher draws on current research evidence about effective practice in
making decisions about how to work with a student or group of students; - The teacher integrates knowledge about who the student is, including knowl-
edge of their characteristics, circumstances and prior experiences, into
decision-making about the student and their own teaching;
154 J. Kriewaldt et al.