Just-in-time performance support as an educational process

In an apprenticeship model, for a trainee who is developing their skills, situating them in the workplace has distinct advantages. Starting from legitimate peripheral participation, the developing clinician is moulded by social interaction and collaboration while they learn from the spectrum of patients that make up a given clinical population.1 The goal is lasting behavioural and cognitive changes in the trainee as they take up the mantle of ‘expert clinician’.

However, to take on legitimate roles in the clinical workplace, a trainee requires direct just-in-time support, or ‘scaffolding’, in the form of supervision. Their preceptors provide enough support to ensure that safe and successful patient management can be accomplished. This is analogous to training wheels for someone learning to ride a bicycle—a scaffolding mechanism that enables a relative novice to perform the activity from start to finish when they otherwise would not have been able to.2 A novice such as a medical student requires considerable support and so leans considerably on the training wheels. As the learner progressively develops as a practitioner, they will require less and less scaffolding.3 The training wheels are used less …