Educating Field Instructors and Students to Deal with Challenges in Their Teaching Relationships

Abstract

In an attempt to facilitate productive relationships between students and field instructors a series of educational workshops were offered to provide the knowledge and interpersonal skills associated with satisfactory learning partnerships. This paper presents the content and format of these workshops that aimed to address crucial topics identified as challenges for students and field instructors. These topics are (a) improving communication in providing reciprocal feedback about teaching and learning, especially about the working relationship; (b) attending to and managing perceptions and incidents related to the power differential inherent in the student and field instructor roles; (c) developing skills for effective conflict resolution.

Key Words:

• Field instruction
• relationship
• communication
• power
• conflict