Project Description Narrative:
Traditionally, teaching and other educational activities are, for the most part, “largely private work, guided by tradition, but informed by shared inquiry or understanding of what works” (Hutchings P, Huber MT. Carnegie Perspectives: Building the Teaching Commons. March 2006). More recently, however, with the explosion of new knowledge in the field of education (e.g., how adults learn, the role of deliberate practice in development of competence, simulation-based training and assessment, team-based learning) and medicine (e.g., evidence-based medicine, population health, genetics), expectations at both institutional and accreditation levels have changed. Curricular, teaching, and learner assessment decisions must be informed by educational principles and evidence. For example, the Accreditation Council on Graduate Medical Education derived its general competencies through a “careful study of existing research on general competencies for physicians” and requires “increasingly more useful, valid, and reliable methods of assessing resident’s attainment” of these competencies.
In combination, these factors create a demand for faculty who are well versed in the principles and best practices in education. At MCW, and nationally, as the number of clinical faculty continues to increase, so do the number of faculty interested in teaching and desirous of training in education theory and practice. Nationally, the response has been the development of formal, longitudinal faculty scholars’ programs for medical educators. These project-focused scholars’ programs can and have built and sustained the capacity of faculty as educators whose products are of sufficient quality to be recognized and rewarded through academic promotion.
This project aims to design, implement, and evaluate the impact of a longitudinal, structured faculty development program for medical educators: the Educational Scholar Program. It further seeks to create a cadre of educators who apply evidence and best-practices from the field of education to systematically design, implement, and evaluate instruction and learners.