Get to know your students better

Let me ask you a question, based on the things that we’ve covered about how to motivate students. What questions do you think a preceptor might ask  student to gain insight to be able to influence to the students confidence and commitment. If you’re sitting down with student during the beginnings of rotation during the orientation process. What questions might a preceptor asked to get to know the students? So the preceptor has a better ability to influence and motivate the students the rotation progressive. Some of these questions might be a personal nature. What are your interests? what are your hobbies? Just to get to know the students. To break the ice.

The idea is asking such questions will send a message to the students that the preceptor is interested in the students as a person. It does want to get to know the student. But the question should go beyond just personal interests. Where are you from? Tell me a little bit about your family. What are your interests? What are your hobbies? What do you like to do? But ask some questions about the relationship to the pharmacy. What kind of courses have you enjoyed? What courses didn’t you enjoy? What are your goals of pharmacy? What do you think about this rotation? Do you have any apprehension about this rotation?

Do you have any questions for me about this rotation, about pharmacy, about the future of pharmacy. You want to establish an open line of communication and get to know the students a little bit by close attention to the answers to the questions that you asked and try to utilize that information as you know the student better. Try to resolve issues in a constructive way. In ways that motivate and hopefully light a fire of motivation to learn in your students. So let’s review what we’ve covered in session four, bringing out the best in students. Experiential learning principles that we’ve covered in this session. Motivation is the driving force behind learning. Student need to be motivated.

And even if we can’t directly motivate them, we have to try to put them in situations that will provide them with experiences that will touch them deeply and affect their motivation. Experiential learning involves the heart as much as the brain. We have to think of the student holistically, full person and try to understand what their priorities are. What their values are? What’s important to them? And tap into that as they go through the rotation. Corrective action should be tailored to performance deficiency. We first have to communicate about performance deficiency, not make assumptions right off the bat. But begin by obtaining the perceptions of the student and discussion.

Then, tailoring the corrective action to feedback from the students about his or her perceptions or expectations. So that the corrective action correctly fits whatever the problem is. The problem can be accurately diagnosed based on information obtained from the students. Our guaranteed precepting techniques for session four. First, light a fire. Find a way to motivate students remember that education is not about just providing information. It’s about lighting a fire, a desire to learn and students. Rules are rules. It is up to a preceptor to enforce the rules. You have to make sure that students understand what the rules are. To be proactive providing feedback when there’s any discrepancy in the rules of the standards of the policies. The Oz protocol.

That it’s important to diagnose whether a problem related to competence, confidence or commitment and to come up with corrective actions that correspond to the correct diagnosis. Our one remaining session is to focus on properties of great preceptors and qualities of great rotation. And I’m not going to provide you with simply my own opinion of these. I’m going to provide information from the literature. Studies that have been done on feedback from students for great preceptors and preceptors that perhaps once so great. What was the difference? For those studies we can clean a lot of information about what it’s going to take for you to be a great preceptor and have a great rotation.