Why We Need More Clinical Educators in Dentistry (And How to Become One)

If you’ve ever supervised a student in the chair, you already know something most CPD calendars don’t talk about: clinical education is a skill set of its own. It’s not the same as being a great clinician. It’s not the same as being a great communicator. It sits at the intersection of both, and almost nobody gets formally trained in it before they’re handed a student and told to “show them the ropes.”

This gap is one of the reasons CDE exists, and it’s a big part of what my PhD research is digging into.

The problem no one names

Dental practitioners are routinely expected to step into graduate educator roles; supervising students, mentoring new grads, running clinical placements, with little to no preparation for the teaching part of the job. Clinical competence gets you in the door. It doesn’t tell you how to give feedback that actually changes behaviour, how to scaffold a learner’s growing autonomy, or how to manage the awkward moment when a student does something unsafe in front of a patient.

The result? Some practitioners become brilliant clinical educators by trial and error, some get permanently put off supervising altogether, and students get a wildly inconsistent experience depending on who they’re rostered with that week. Multiply that across every clinic, every placement block, every new graduate year, and you start to see how much is riding on something the profession has never formally trained anyone to do.

It also means the practitioners who are good at it tend to get good at it the hard way  through years of trial, error, and the occasional uncomfortable debrief, rather than through any structured development path. That’s a slow, inefficient way to build a profession’s teaching capacity, and it leaves a lot of good clinicians sitting on the sidelines simply because no one ever showed them how to start.

What the research says

Through my scoping review work, the barriers tend to cluster around a few consistent themes:

• No formal pathway. Most practitioners fall into educator roles rather than choosing them, with no structured onboarding. One day you’re a clinician; the next you’re handed a student with no orientation to what’s actually expected of you in that role.
• Time and workload pressure. Clinical educators are often expected to teach on top of clinical loads, not instead of them. There’s rarely protected time built in for supervision, debriefing, or reflection, it just gets squeezed into an already full day.
• Lack of recognition. Educator work is rarely valued the same way clinical output is; in pay, title, or career progression. It’s frequently treated as a favour you’re doing the practice or the university, rather than a distinct professional contribution worth recognising.
• Skills gap. Feedback, assessment, and supervision are teachable skills, but they’re rarely taught. Most practitioners are working from instinct, from how they were once taught (for better or worse), or from sheer guesswork.

None of this is a personal failing on the part of practitioners. It’s a systemic gap in how the profession prepares people for a role it asks almost everyone to eventually play. And because the gap is systemic rather than individual, it won’t close through good intentions alone. It needs structure, training, and a profession-wide shift in how we think about teaching as a skill.

The students have changed too

It’s not just the educator side of this equation that’s shifted. University study itself looks nothing like it did even a decade ago. Today’s students are navigating financial pressure, mental health demands, and life circumstances that previous cohorts simply didn’t carry in the same way, on top of a curriculum and clinical expectations that haven’t necessarily adjusted to reflect that.

I think we, as a profession, don’t always extend students the grace that this reality calls for. There’s a tendency to measure current students against a memory of how “we” coped at their stage, without acknowledging how much more they’re juggling, or how different the pressures actually are. A good clinical educator needs to understand the landscape their student is operating in now, not the one the educator trained in. That’s part of the skill set too, and it’s one more reason this can’t just be left to instinct.

Why this matters for OHTs specificially

For Oral Health Therapists, this gap can be even sharper. Scope of practice conversations are already complex, and when an OHT is supervising a student or mentoring a new graduate, they’re often doing it without any formal acknowledgement that educator is now part of their professional identity, let alone training to back it up.

There’s also an added layer for OHTs working across multiple settings or scopes: explaining your own scope clearly enough for a student to learn from it requires a level of clarity that many of us were never explicitly taught ourselves. You can be entirely confident in your own practice and still find it genuinely difficult to articulate why you’re making a particular clinical decision in a way a learner can follow and build on. That’s not a knowledge problem, it’s a teaching problem, and teaching problems have teachable solutions.

A word on “easy money”

I’ll say this plainly: I’ve heard clinical education described, more than once, as easy money. An easy gig you pick up on the side without much thought. I don’t agree, and I think that attitude does real damage.

Clinical education done properly is demanding. It asks you to read a learner accurately, adjust your communication on the fly, hold space for someone else’s mistakes without letting a patient come to harm, and do all of that while sometimes still running your own clinical day. Anyone walking into it expecting an easy paycheck either hasn’t done it properly, or isn’t in it for the right reasons, and students are the ones who end up wearing the difference.

If we want the profession to take clinical education seriously, that starts with practitioners taking it seriously themselves: showing up prepared, treating it as a genuine skill set, and recognising that the quality of a student’s education depends entirely on the effort the educator is willing to put in.

Where CDE comes in

This is exactly the space our Clinical Educators Course was built for: structured, practical training in how to teach in a clinical setting, feedback frameworks, supervision models, and the kind of scaffolding that actually builds learner competence and confidence, instead of leaving it to luck.

The course doesn’t ask you to become a different kind of practitioner. It gives you tools to make explicit what’s currently implicit: how to structure a debrief so it actually lands, how to give feedback that changes behaviour rather than just noting what went wrong, and how to gradually hand over autonomy to a learner without either over-protecting them or throwing them in the deep end.

If you’re already informally mentoring students or new grads, this isn’t extra work. It’s giving language and structure to something you’re already doing, and doing it with a lot more confidence and a lot less second-guessing yourself in the moment.

The bigger picture

My hope, both through CDE and through the research, is that “clinical educator” stops being an invisible job people fall into and starts being a recognised pathway, with proper training, proper recognition, and a proper seat at the table in how our profession grows its next generation.

That shift matters beyond any individual practitioner’s career. Every student who gets a strong, structured clinical education experience is more likely to become a confident, capable practitioner, and, eventually, a better educator themselves. Closing this gap isn’t just about supporting the people currently doing the teaching. It’s about building a profession that gets better at training the next generation with every cohort, instead of leaving it to chance.

If that’s a gap you’ve felt in your own career, you’re not imagining it. There’s a name for it now, and increasingly, there’s a course for it too.