Teaching in the Health Professions

Course Description

Teaching in the Health Professions takes an analytical and developmental approach to the roles and functions of health professional teachers. It covers teaching methodologies, instructional approaches, and lesson development grounded in educational theory, and addresses clinical instruction technique, educational technology, and evaluation strategies suited to learners from varied backgrounds.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, RTE is the Radiography prefix, and the 3000-level number places this in the upper division of a bachelor's completion programme. Daytona State publishes it at 3 credits, offered fall, spring, and summer, giving approximately 45 contact hours consistent with the published RTE3590 and RTE3765.

The course exists because of a structural fact about the health professions: clinical education is delivered almost entirely by practitioners who were never trained to teach. A technologist who is excellent at imaging is assigned a student and expected to instruct, assess, and evaluate — competencies that are learnable and are not acquired by being good at the underlying job.

⚠ Availability note: found in the 2025–2026 catalog

This course is published in Daytona State's 2025–2026 catalog as part of the B.S. in Radiologic and Imaging Sciences, and does not appear in the 2024–2025 edition. Upper-division imaging coursework is a comparatively recent addition at the state college level in Florida, so check the current catalog year rather than an older one when confirming availability, prerequisites, or credit value.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe the roles and functions of the health professions educator across classroom, laboratory, and clinical settings.
• Describe major learning theories and their implications for instruction.
• Apply adult learning principles to instructional design.
• Describe learning domains and levels of cognitive complexity.
• Write measurable learning objectives at appropriate cognitive levels.
• Develop a lesson plan with aligned objectives, activities, and assessment.
• Select instructional methods appropriate to content, learners, and setting.
• Deliver instruction effectively, including presentation and facilitation technique.
• Apply active learning strategies and describe their evidence base.
• Design and deliver laboratory and skills instruction.
• Apply clinical teaching methods, including questioning, modelling, and coaching.
• Provide effective formative feedback to learners.
• Design assessments aligned to objectives and describe validity and reliability.
• Write examination items that test the intended cognitive level.
• Evaluate clinical performance using competency-based instruments.
• Manage and remediate the struggling learner.
• Apply educational technology appropriately, including learning management systems and simulation.
• Teach learners from varied educational, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds.
• Apply accessibility requirements and accommodate learners with disabilities.
• Describe programme accreditation requirements relevant to instruction and assessment.
• Apply professional and ethical standards in the educator role, including confidentiality and boundaries.
• Evaluate one's own teaching and act on feedback.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe curriculum design and mapping.
• Describe programme evaluation and outcomes assessment.
• Describe simulation design and debriefing technique.
• Describe interprofessional education.
• Describe online and hybrid course design.
• Describe the scholarship of teaching and learning.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Roles of the health professions educator
• Learning theories and their implications
• Adult learning principles
• Learning domains and cognitive levels
• Writing measurable objectives
• Lesson planning and alignment
• Selecting instructional methods
• Presentation and facilitation
• Active learning strategies
• Laboratory and skills instruction
• Clinical teaching methods
• Formative feedback
• Assessment design, validity, and reliability
• Item writing
• Competency-based clinical evaluation
• The struggling learner and remediation
• Educational technology and simulation
• Teaching diverse learners
• Accessibility and accommodation
• Accreditation and instruction
• Ethics and boundaries in the educator role
• Self-evaluation of teaching

Optional Topics

• Curriculum design and mapping
• Programme evaluation
• Simulation and debriefing
• Interprofessional education
• Online and hybrid design
• Scholarship of teaching and learning

Resources & Tools

• Teaching in Nursing and Role of the Educator (Oermann) or An Introduction to Medical Teaching (Huggett & Jeffries) — the standard health professions education texts.
• Understanding by Design (Wiggins & McTighe) — the backward-design framework that underlies objective-activity-assessment alignment.
• Make It Stick (Brown, Roediger & McDaniel) — accessible and evidence-based on retrieval practice and spacing; genuinely changes how people teach.
• ASRT (asrt.org) — the professional body for radiologic technologists; educator resources and continuing education.
• JRCERT (jrcert.org) — free accreditation standards, which specify what programmes must do in instruction, assessment, and clinical supervision.
• ARRT (arrt.org) — free content specifications and the didactic and clinical requirements that shape curriculum.
• AAMC MedEdPORTAL — free, peer-reviewed teaching resources across the health professions.
• W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) — free, and the standard for accessible instructional materials.
• Your institution's teaching and learning centre — free workshops and consultation, and heavily underused by adjunct clinical faculty.
• PubMed and library databases — free through enrollment; health professions education has a substantial research literature.

Career Pathways

• Clinical instructor — the role most graduates step into, supervising students in the imaging department.
• Clinical coordinator — a JRCERT-recognized programme role coordinating clinical education across sites.
• Programme faculty — didactic instruction in an accredited radiography programme; the B.S. is typically the minimum.
• Programme director — normally requires a master's degree plus experience under JRCERT standards.
• Hospital clinical educator — staff development and competency validation within a department.
• Applications specialist — equipment manufacturers employ technologists to train customers, and it pays well.
• Continuing education provider — developing and delivering approved CE.
• Department supervisor or manager — teaching competence supports the leadership track.
• Graduate study — a master's in health professions education or instructional design is the natural continuation.
• SOC codes 25-1071 Health Specialties Teachers, Postsecondary and 29-2034 Radiologic Technologists; departmental education roles under 11-9111.

Special Information

⚠ Being expert makes you a worse explainer — this is documented

The most useful finding in the education literature for practitioners who become teachers, and it explains the specific difficulty of clinical instruction.

Expertise degrades the ability to teach a beginner. As a skill becomes automatic, the intermediate steps become invisible to the person performing it — the expert blind spot — so an experienced technologist positions a patient without consciously deciding anything and cannot readily articulate what they did.

The consequences and the corrections:

• You will skip steps without knowing it. The remedy is to deconstruct the task explicitly, in writing, before teaching it — a written procedure breakdown surfaces steps you would have omitted.
• You will underestimate difficulty. What is obvious to you took you years. A student who cannot see the anatomy on the image is not being slow; they have not yet built the pattern.
• Think aloud while demonstrating. Narrating your reasoning — why this angle, what you are checking for, what would make you adjust — is what makes expert judgement visible. This is the single most valuable clinical teaching technique.
• Ask the learner to explain their reasoning rather than only checking their result. A correct image produced by luck is a different situation from one produced by understanding.
• Cognitive load is real. A novice managing patient, equipment, positioning, and technique simultaneously has no capacity left for a lecture. Teach one thing at a time and debrief afterwards.
• Scaffold and fade. Do it with them, then supervise closely, then supervise loosely, then let them work. Removing support too quickly produces failure; leaving it too long prevents independence.

⚠ Feedback is a skill, and most clinical feedback is useless

The competency that most improves a clinical instructor, because the default patterns are known to fail.

• "Good job" teaches nothing, and neither does silence. Feedback must be specific enough that the learner knows what to repeat or change.
• Describe the behaviour and its effect. "Your collimation on that shoulder cut off the acromion, so the radiologist can't assess the joint" is actionable; "that image wasn't great" is not.
• Timely beats comprehensive. Feedback close to the performance is retained; feedback at the end of a rotation is a verdict, not a teaching act.
• Separate formative from summative. Learners take risks and reveal gaps when they know they are not being graded. If everything is evaluative, they will hide uncertainty — which is exactly what you need to see.
• Ask before telling. "How do you think that went?" produces self-assessment, and learners who identify their own errors correct them more durably.
• Do not correct in front of patients, and never in a way that undermines the learner's standing with the patient. Step away.
• Give more positive than corrective feedback, specifically. Learners who receive only correction stop volunteering and start avoiding.
• Document as you go. An end-of-rotation evaluation written from memory is unfair and indefensible; contemporaneous notes make it accurate.

The related and harder skill: managing the struggling learner. Address it early and explicitly, in private; state the specific gap and the specific expectation; document the conversation and the plan; and involve the programme's clinical coordinator promptly. The most common failure is postponing the conversation until an unsatisfactory final evaluation, which removes every opportunity for the student to fix it and is genuinely unjust.

⚠ Align objectives, teaching, and assessment — or you are testing something else

The design discipline that separates a course from a series of talks.

• Write measurable objectives. "Understand radiation protection" cannot be assessed; "calculate the dose reduction achieved by doubling source-to-skin distance" can. The verb determines whether the objective is usable.
• Match the cognitive level. If the objective requires application, a recall question does not assess it. Much assessment in the health professions tests memorization while the objectives claim analysis.
• Design assessment first, then teach to it — the backward design principle. Knowing what competent performance looks like tells you what instruction has to accomplish.
• Write items carefully. Avoid negatives, "all of the above", implausible distractors, and grammatical cues that give the answer away. Item flaws measure test-wiseness rather than knowledge.
• Competency-based clinical evaluation requires observable criteria and multiple observations. A single global impression is unreliable, and accreditors expect documented competency demonstration.
• Accreditation drives structure. JRCERT standards specify requirements for curriculum, clinical supervision ratios, and assessment, and ARRT content specifications shape what must be covered. Understanding both is part of the educator role.
• Use retrieval practice and spacing. Testing improves retention more than re-reading, and distributed practice beats massed practice — findings robust enough to build a course around.

⚠ The clinical instructor holds real power — use it carefully

The ethical dimension, worth naming because clinical education involves an unusual power asymmetry.

• You control a student's progression. An unsatisfactory clinical evaluation can end a programme, and students know it. That asymmetry shapes every interaction and makes fairness a professional obligation rather than a courtesy.
• Evaluate against criteria, not personality. Documented, criterion-referenced evaluation protects students from bias and protects you from challenge.
• Be alert to your own patterns. Which students get the interesting cases, the benefit of the doubt, and the extra explanation? Reviewing your own distribution is the most useful equity practice available to an instructor.
• Maintain boundaries. Social relationships with current students compromise evaluation, and social media connections are best avoided while a student is under your supervision.
• Student information is confidential. Academic records are protected, and discussing a student's performance with colleagues who have no need to know is a breach.
• Patient safety outranks teaching. A student is never left with a patient beyond their competence, and supervision requirements exist for that reason — accreditation standards set them explicitly.
• Model the profession. Students absorb attitudes toward patients, colleagues, and radiation safety far more than they absorb content, and a cynical instructor produces cynical technologists.

⚠ JRCERT, ARRT, and Florida licensure — the imaging pathway

• Graduation from a JRCERT-accredited programme is the standard route to ARRT certification eligibility in radiography. Accreditation is a gate rather than a quality signal; JRCERT publishes programme effectiveness data, and it is worth checking.
• The ARRT credential (R) is the primary qualification, and ARRT requires an associate degree or higher for certification.
• Florida licenses radiologic technologists through the Department of Health under Chapter 468, Part IV, Florida Statutes. Licensure is separate from certification and has its own application and fees.
• Post-primary credentials — computed tomography, magnetic resonance, mammography, vascular-interventional, and others — are how imaging careers advance, and each has its own clinical experience requirements.
• Continuing education is required for ARRT biennial renewal, and ARRT operates a structured continuing qualifications process.

Rule 11 applies — ARRT eligibility rules, JRCERT standards, and Florida licensure provisions change. Verify with each body directly.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement.

RTE3253 is 3 credits and approximately 45 contact hours, offered fall, spring, and summer in a format designed for working technologists. Expect applied deliverables — lesson plans, written objectives, assessment items, a teaching demonstration, and a critique of clinical evaluation instruments — alongside engagement with the education literature. Build the deliverables around your own department where you can, since they become usable material.

RTE3253 is upper division and will not be satisfied by associate-level coursework. Students entering a bachelor's completion programme should note that A.S. degrees are applied and do not carry the A.A.'s junior-status guarantee, though these completion programmes are built for credentialed A.S. graduates and publish their articulation explicitly.