Preceptor Development: Promoting a Growth Mindset in Pharmacy Experiential Education

Mindsets can be thoughts of as the internal “coding” or beliefs that shape how individuals interact with the world around them. Those with a growth mindset believe that humans have the capacity to adapt and change, and that certain qualities, such as intelligence, personality, and abilities can be developed with persistence and nurturing. Those with a fixed mindset tend to resist learning opportunities.

 

Often overlooked in healthcare training, mindsets are an important consideration for those involved in the education of health science students. A variety of factors in today's healthcare landscape indicate a growing need for growth mindset education in health care education including: learning from errors, fostering continuing professional development skills, and preventing burnout. Several teaching strategies exist include providing direct instruction about growth and fixed mindset, candidly and humbly share stories of their own personal failures and rejections, Socratic style questioning where learners are often not working to arrive at the “right” answer, but the “best” answer in critical-thinking type questions. In this fashion, the educator must help the learner to feel safe and embrace a growth mindset so that they can take risks with their responses and explore a topic thoroughly).