The lack of substantial research in the area of clinical teaching would suggest that this ‘heart’ of the nursing student's professional education has long been neglected Employing a qualitative descriptive methodology, this study explored the teaching activities that nine clinical instructors said they implemented during the direct client care period and the teaching activities that these nine clinical instructors said they would implement in response to a specific scenario of a clinical teaching event The unstructured interviews revealed that clinical instructors (a) noted role modelling the greatest number of times as a teaching activity but implemented it less frequently, (b) used verbalizations in the form of telling, asking, saying, discussing or talking as the primary teaching activity in the clinical area and in response to the specific scenario, (c) do not have opportunities to see other clinical instructors teaching in the clinical area, (d) have difficulty separating teaching activities and evaluation activities, (e) are eclectic in their use of learning theories, and (f) find articulating teaching activities that they implement during the direct client care period to be a complex task.