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Residents as Teachers and Educators

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Graduate Medical Education in Psychiatry

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Abstract

Residents who work with medical students or junior residents in a clinical setting need strong skills in establishing a positive learning climate, recognizing how much students look to them as role models, setting expectations, giving and receiving feedback, “on the fly” teaching in busy clinical settings, and a working knowledge of institutional goals and expectations for students and other learners. Depending on their teaching roles, they may also need skills in assessment, and didactic and small group teaching. Specific residents as teachers (RATs) content and learning objectives are informed by the learners and clinical settings in which residents teach. A successful RATs curriculum should include training in the One Minute Preceptor and include at least 3 hours of contact time (preferably 8–13 hours). A RATs curriculum should also include some level of pre- and post-assessment to ensure residents’ needs are being met. A longitudinal experience with personal goal setting, active learning, reinforcement of key concepts and opportunities for observed, workplace teaching with feedback and reflection is the optimal model. The establishment of a Medical Educator Track (MET) can prepare interested residents for careers as faculty, which highlights the value afforded to education in a program. A sample MET curriculum based on our experience is outlined.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Quick and Easy Guide to Creating a Safe Learning Environment.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, Springfield, IL, USA

    Karen Broquet & Arindam Chakrabarty

Authors
  1. Karen Broquet
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  2. Arindam Chakrabarty
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Karen Broquet .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurobiology, The University of Alabama at Birmingham, Heersink School of Medicine, Birmingham, AL, USA

    Matthew Macaluso

  2. Department of Psychiatry, Neuroscience Institute Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, Springfield, IL, USA

    L. Joy Houston

  3. Department of Psychiatry, Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, OR, USA

    J. Mark Kinzie

  4. Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Deborah S. Cowley

Appendix 1: SIU Department of Psychiatry

Appendix 1: SIU Department of Psychiatry

Medical Educator Track Manual

MET Goals and Objectives

Mission and overall goal

In addition to being an outstanding teacher, a successful educator must be able to effectively design and deliver educational curricula, evaluate learners and programs, investigate and disseminate educational scholarship, and be an efficient administrator and leader of people. The Medical Educator Track at SIU SOM Department of Psychiatry is designed for residents who are planning or considering a career in academic psychiatry. It provides future psychiatric leaders in education with the opportunity to develop the skills they need to excel as teachers and as educational administrators, scholars, mentors, and leaders.

Objectives

  1. 1.

    Develop medical education knowledge and skills including the following:

    1. (a)

      Adult Learning Theory and Styles

    2. (b)

      Giving and receiving feedback

    3. (c)

      Clinical teaching skills

    4. (d)

      Didactic presentation skills

    5. (e)

      Small group teaching skills

    6. (f)

      Learner assessment

    7. (g)

      Curriculum design

    8. (h)

      Curriculum and program assessment

    9. (i)

      Basics of educational technology/distance learning

  2. 2.

    Develop, teach (or co-teach), and evaluate a formal curriculum.

  3. 3.

    Demonstrate expertise in a given area pertinent to medical education via the presentation or publication of a scholarly product(s).

  4. 4.

    Begin to identify and develop personal mentorship and leadership skills and style.

  5. 5.

    Participate in at least one professional organization (AAP, AADPRT, ADMSEP) relevant to academic psychiatry.

  6. 6.

    Identify factors, experiences and abilities that are associated with successful career advancement in academic psychiatry.

Met Curriculum

A curriculum is defined as a planned education experience. If all goes well, by the end of this MET experience, you will have achieved all or most of the objectives outlined above. The means by which a curriculum’s objectives are achieved are known as the educational strategies. Devising a good educational strategy requires attention to both the content and method of delivery.

The primary educational strategy for MET is mentoring, geared primarily toward helping you forge an identity as a medical educator and begin to assemble a dossier, to shepherd you though scholarly product(s) and to role model a successful career as a clinician educator. Because many of the objectives are attitudinal and/or performance based, other important educational strategies include self-directed learning and lots of practical teaching experience, followed by reflection and feedback. Because it is sometimes more efficient (or just more fun) to set aside some time to learn about a specific content area together, there will also be a number of didactic sessions. If you have applied for and been accepted into the MET, you have made a commitment to yourself and to the program to put time and effort into it. We believe the MET objectives are very achievable, but many of them require some advance planning. Please carefully review the section on planning and logistics in your Welcome Letter.

Mentorship

You will have a Developmental Mentor to guide you through the whole MET experience. It is the expectation that you and your Developmental Mentor will meet monthly, on average. We understand that sometimes a project may require more frequent meetings and sometimes life conspires to interfere with a meeting.

Twice per year, you and your Developmental Mentor are asked to fill out a Mentoring Guide Sheet. This is to help keep you both focused and to allow us to gather some data about how our MET residents focus their time and energy.

Before your first meeting with your Developmental Mentor, we would encourage you to read the resources provided in Dropbox on how to get the most out of a mentoring relationship. A rewarding mentoring relationship is much like any other relationship – it requires a regular line of communication about goals and needs, ongoing mutual feedback, etc. Each MET resident will need different things from their mentor (see self-directed learning below). We will be asking both of you for feedback on the mentoring process from time to time, but a yearly form cannot substitute for ongoing conversation!

You will also have access to a variety of technical Mentors – other faculty within the Department of Psychiatry or other departments in the school to help with specific projects, learning issues, or teaching opportunities, or to provide expertise and guidance in areas where your Developmental Mentor has gaps.

Reflection and Feedback Opportunities

In addition to mentoring, reflection and feedback are key educational strategies for the MET experience. Every 6 months, we ask that you write up a formal reflection, reviewing the experiences you have had, what you have learned about yourself as an educator, how this learning is (or will be) applied, and your next learning steps. This should be about one page or so in length. In addition, we ask you to reflect on all of your learning and teaching experiences and note in your Educational Passport or Teaching Activities Log. These reflections will be brief and will likely center more on cognitive or skill learning.

We encourage you to seek feedback at every opportunity, especially on your teaching skills. It has been our experience that learners are generous in sharing their input regarding what has been helpful or not helpful for them, especially if you follow the principles of a safe learning climateFootnote 1 and inform them in advance that you will be soliciting feedback. In addition, you can invite MET faculty to observe you in your natural clinical teaching habitat or in formal teaching sessions and offer feedback. Faculty are available to give you focused feedback on presentation skills and on your CV.

Self-Directed Learning

Self-directed learning means that you take primary responsibility for your learning, identify what you need to know (or know how), clarify and refine your personal goals and objectives, and identify and use the resources and educational strategies that best help you meet them. It also means that you regularly (and accurately!) assess your achievements and repeat your learning cycle if necessary.

Because the number and variety of available resources can be a bit overwhelming, we offer some resources to help you get started:

  • Both you and your Developmental Mentor will have a copy of Curriculum Development for Medical Education: A 6 Step Approach, 3rd Edition; Thomas, et al., Eds. This is an outstanding book and we encourage you to read it cover to cover!

  • You will receive an invitation to a Dropbox account for an MET resource library. The materials contained here are either classics or a reasonable starting point for any given content area.

Didactic Offerings

MET has a specific 2-year rolling didactic curriculum. It looks like this – with the usual disclaimer that we reserve the right to change at any moment. The shaded areas indicate core content that will be addressed yearly. The sessions in this list are all content areas that we feel are well delivered in a didactic format, and not already a part of the residency training. We have flexibility in these sessions, so please let us know if you have topic requests.

figure a

Please use the Education Passport provided to keep track of any and all of your didactic or other formal learning experiences during your MET participation.

Teaching Opportunities

Clinical teaching

There is no shortage of opportunities to participate in clinical teaching. As a result, we have not built extra clinical teaching experiences into the curriculum. We encourage you to stretch your clinical teaching wings as much as you can – take every opportunity to teach, hone, and expand your clinical teaching skills and actively seek feedback on your teaching skills.

Didactic teaching

Didactic just means the art or science of teaching. Functionally, when we use the term didactic, it implies a group of learners gathering in the same space and time with one or more folks serving as “teachers,” as opposed to bedside clinical teaching. Didactic teaching might involve giving a lecture, facilitating a small group for discussion or team-based learning, serving as a problem-based learning tutor, or organizing or delivering a seminar session or series.

One of the important skill objectives for MET is to develop, teach (or co-teach), and evaluate a formal curriculum. We encourage you to start thinking about this aspect of your MET experience early. Identifying opportunities to teach or co-teach takes some lead time and scheduling takes some forethought. It is very rewarding to be able to develop, deliver, and assess the same curriculum. However, you may find that it works out better for you to assess, or help teach an existing curriculum, and build your development skills on another project.

Please use the Teaching Activities Log provided to keep track of any and all of your didactic or clinical teaching experiences during your MET participation.

Scholarly Opportunities

An important skill objective for MET is to demonstrate expertise in a given area pertinent to medical education via the presentation or publication of a scholarly product(s). As with your curricular objectives, we encourage to start thinking about this early!

What We Ask of You

At various points in your MET journey, we ask that you provide us with copies of the following materials:

  • Your initial and 6-month Mentor Meeting Guides

  • Your Educational Passport (yearly)

  • Your Teaching Activities Log (yearly)

  • MET Participant Update forms (as requested)

  • Feedback forms on MET experiences, sessions, etc. (as requested)

  • Any curricular or scholarly projects you complete (as they arise)

  • Follow-up surveys after you leave us to go do great things

You are welcome to provide copies of your 6-month reflections, but we will not require this. We do ask that you discuss them with your Developmental Mentor, but sometimes knowing that others will read your reflection can be a barrier to transformational learning.

We feel that this information can give us a good idea of what participants are doing, and which aspects of the MET program may need to be adjusted. We also recognize that, even though MET is voluntary and we will not be keeping attendance, a little bit of accountability can be a helpful motivator when lives get busy.

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Broquet, K., Chakrabarty, A. (2022). Residents as Teachers and Educators. In: Macaluso, M., Houston, L.J., Kinzie, J.M., Cowley, D.S. (eds) Graduate Medical Education in Psychiatry. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-00836-8_24

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