Competent clinical reasoning skills are necessary for providing safe and effective health care. Professional level health science education programs are keenly interested in fostering effective clinical reasoning skills. As such, many programs expect students to engage in complex clinical reasoning tasks early in their education. However, early novice students may not be entering programs with the requisite skills to meet those expectations. Pre-professional undergraduate anatomy curricula are prerequisites for professional education programs across the health sciences and could be an appropriate context for developing initial clinical reasoning skills, providing a "cognitive head start" for students matriculating into professional health science education programs. This article describes an evidence-based pedagogical approach for teaching initial clinical reasoning skills within an undergraduate anatomy curriculum. While an undergraduate anatomy curriculum is the context in this case, this approach is based on high-level pedagogical concepts and could be modified and adopted across the spectrum of disciplines that prepare students for professional level health science education programs.