Background: Clinical reasoning is fundamental to all forms of professional health practice, however it is also\r\ndifficult to teach and learn because it is complex, tacit, and effectively invisible for students. In this paper we\r\npresent an approach for teaching clinical reasoning based on making expert thinking visible and accessible to\r\nstudents.\r\nMethods: Twenty-one experienced allied health clinical educators from three tertiary Australian hospitals attended\r\nup to seven action research discussion sessions, where they developed a tentative heuristic of their own clinical\r\nreasoning, trialled it with students, evaluated if it helped their students to reason clinically, and then refined it so\r\nthe heuristic was targeted to developing each studentââ?¬â?¢s reasoning skills. Data included participantsââ?¬â?¢ written\r\ndescriptions of the thinking routines they developed and trialed with their students and the transcribed action\r\nresearch discussion sessions. Content analysis was used to summarise this data and categorise themes about\r\nteaching and learning clinical reasoning.\r\nResults: Two overriding themes emerged from participantsââ?¬â?¢ reports about using the ââ?¬Ë?making thinking visible\r\napproachââ?¬â?¢. The first was a specific focus by participating educators on studentsââ?¬â?¢ understanding of the reasoning\r\nprocess and the second was heightened awareness of personal teaching styles and approaches to teaching clinical\r\nreasoning.\r\nConclusions: We suggest that the making thinking visible approach has potential to assist educators to become\r\nmore reflective about their clinical reasoning teaching and acts as a scaffold to assist them to articulate their own\r\nexpert reasoning and for students to access and use.
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