Dental Hygiene Clinical Instructors’ Pedagogical Beliefs and Described Practices About Student-Centered Education

Abstract

The aims of this study were to understand dental hygiene clinical instructors’ teaching and learning perspectives regarding their described pedagogical beliefs, perceived roles in facilitating learning, and factors that influenced those perspectives and to assess how their espoused beliefs matched their instructional practice in relation to student-centered competency-based education. The Theory of Planned Behavior was used as a theoretical framework to guide the qualitative study design and analysis. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with 15 dental hygiene clinical instructors at a Canadian university in 2014. Transcript data derived from the interviews were coded for thematic analysis. In the results, these dental hygiene clinical instructors reported a spectrum of pedagogical beliefs, with one end defined as student-centered and the other end teacher-centered. While the instructors tended to describe their teaching as student-centered, their responses in the simulated teaching scenarios of the interview were closer to teacher-centered practices. Interview-analysis results showed that the process by which the instructors developed their approaches to teaching was multifactorial. Factors included instructors’ perceptions of their own learning experiences, experiences of inter-instructor collaboration, and methods of supporting students’ self-efficacy in learning. Given the emergence of support for student-centered education ideology and the program’s adoption of this ideology, this exploratory study suggests that uncovering the teaching and learning beliefs of instructors is crucial prior to designing faculty development programs.