Modern Trends of the N Education in Midwives – New Methods in Practical Training in Midwifery

Introduction: The paper focuses on the innovative teaching methods for clinical training in midwifery, suggests their advantages and disadvantages, and demonstrates their use in the teaching process by means of examples. The traditional teaching approach still persists and exploits standard methods of learning androte memorization, whereby a teacher explains the topic, and assigns students learning tasks. The teacher manages and controls the education – he is the object of the process, and students are only its subject. However, the current practice shows that it is necessary to alter the methods. Objective: The main aim of this presentation is to show, how we should lead students to critical thinking, independent decision-making, use of prior knowledge, and active learning, and thus limit obtaining knowledge by memorizing. An innovative approach means that students should acquire their abilities, skills, and competences independently, and become able to search different ways and options while performing tasks and solving problems. Respective Text: The educational process should be based on the teacher-student cooperation. Implementation of the new teaching methods such as cooperative learning (the jigsaw technique), practice-oriented workshops, interactive evaluation, group discussions, e.g. colloquia, mind maps, clinical case studies, problem-based teaching, role plays, and e-learning could help to improve the quality of the educational process in midwifery. It means that teachers should offer tasks and issues to their students, but students should be main problem-solvers under their teachers’ supervision. A significant characteristic feature of the new methods is educational activities without teachers’ directive attitudes including students’ independent work under supervision. Outcome: It can be proved that modern methods introduced to the education of midwives make the learning process more effective and students acquire skills and knowledge which they can use in clinical practice. True-to-life conditions, model situations, issues of clinical practice used during teaching in laboratory conditions, analysing situations and phenomena that students can experience at a later time reliably simulate situations in the clinical practice. Thus, students obtain abilities to deal with them within the patient-health care provider encounter, search problems actively and independently, and solve them in their clinical practice.