Practical Preceptor Tips from Christina Fry at Dawson High School in Pearland, Texas. They do an amazing job with the Sports Medicine staff, their student aides, and as preceptors for the University of Houston MAT program.







Discussion topics: 




Advancing students in the profession



Preparing students 



Outfitting students



Providing learning opportunities 



Scheduling



What to avoid



Practical Preceptor Tips




How long have you been a preceptor?



7 years. 



Can you share some of the things you have done to help master's students be involved and advance in the profession?



We treat the masters' students as an extension of our staff, we want them to be respected in our ATR just like us.



We have our high school students refer to them as Mr/Ms/Mrs. We interview them to make them feel that they are in a professional setting.



My assistant, Thomas, likes to ask them “What did you learn today?”. We outfit them, invite them to our pregame meals, we make sure that they feel respected. We make sure that every day they learn something new.



You interview them for the position, but they’re already assigned there?



Correct. We ask them to submit a resume, and for a lot of them this is their first job “interview” and ask them interview-like questions and ask them to submit a cover letter.



We then give them critiques so they can start working and build that resume so that when they are done with their program they can apply and be successful for their interviews for their actual job. 



Do you do that just once, or every week, every 3 weeks, etc?



So our level 2’s are with us all year long, we make sure we give them monthly updates. Our level 2 this past year wanted an update every day, every week, so we always were helping her and growing her, anytime there was a hiccup or something she was unsure of, we gave her that reassurance and feedback.



For the level 1’s, it takes a while to get into that comfort zone, but we always try to give them feedback when we notice something, good or bad. 



You talked about outfitting them to make them feel welcome, do we give them the ones that say athletic trainer, or the ones that the students wear, do they keep them; what does that look like for you?



So it varies, level 2 vs level 1. Level 2’s we’ll give them the game day polo for the year, and require them to look professional when they come into the ATR.



Our students will wear Nike shorts and a T-shirt. We ask that our UH students either wear something UH to differentiate them or they wear a polo with either nicer shorts or nicer slacks, with their UH ID badge. And that way it identifies them as an adult and not a student.



More Practical Preceptor Tips: Include them in almost everything! So for GHATS, we made a fun t-shirt for the t-shirt contest, and we had a team-building activity of tie-dying the shirts.



We invited our UH students to join in since they went with us to GHATS, and they were allowed to wear that shirt as a fun GHATS representation. For our level 1’s, if there’s an event going on during the time that they are with us we’ll give them one of the students' shirts, but for the most part, we’ll give them our practice shirt for the year that they can wear to Saturday treatments, etc.



One of the things I’m trying to still work out is scheduling, how do you balance that out and hold them accountable while keeping in mind that they’re college students?



You and I have the luxury of working in a high school setting, so we automatically have Sundays off, that is the one day a week they have off because they are required to have at least one day off within a 7-day span. So we keep that in mind.



We use something called “Homebase” which is a scheduling app, where our students, ourselves, and our UH kids can submit their days off requests, so we honor that.



We always remember that they are students first, so they can communicate with us if they have a big test coming ...