An idiot's guide to 'good clinical teaching'

I can summarise the entire topic with three bullet points in two sections. It's a gift, I know.

What to do:

1. Treat every single question, from 'what does BP stand for?' (allegedly asked by a fellow fourth year the other day) to 'What are the common side effects of phenytoin (or whatever)?' with exactly the same facial expression.
2. Listen to your students. As an observer of teaching these past few weeks, there is nothing more frustrating than when a tutor is answering a different question to the one asked.
3. Accept corrections graciously, not with some crappy excuse.

What not to do:

1. Don't humiliate your students, and if you feel they're particularly in need of humiliation, then at the very least, don't do it in front of patients. In my (humble) opinion, it looks unprofessional if not anything else.
2. Don't assume your student/s are stupider than you. They may not know the content, but rest assured, they're probably NOT stupider than you. So just don't assume that they are.
3. Don't, in the interest of making a session 'interactive', pick on random people then keep beating them into a corner when they don't know an answer. It does nothing, except for make them skive your next session.

Okay, so not totally comprehensive, but whatever. Also totally obvious, but I suspect difficult to follow.

If I ever do end up in teaching then I shall look back on this and remind myself.

The above is probably not a new topic to have been written about, but as I don't read as much as I used to, online or offline, I can't be sure. Apologies if it's a rather unimaginative post, it's just something I wanted to say.

More later!