Summary.The teachers who play the all‐important role of enabling students to learn on clinical clerkships must balance the two essential skills of being a good role model and maintaining objectivity in order to identify students with a variety of problems. This study describes the findings of a survey that identifies both the type of the problems that most bother teachers and the relative frequency of those problems. Non‐cognitive problems (poor interpersonal skills and non‐assertive, shy students) were identified by teachers as being seen at the same relative frequency but posing greater difficulty than cognitive problems (poor integration skills, disorganization, poor fund of knowledge, etc.). A variety of the types of interventions to these problems are disc