Developing and rewarding teachers as educators and scholars: remarkable progress and daunting challenges

Abstract

Context This article describes the scholarly work that has addressed the fifth recommendation of the 1988 World Conference on Medical Education: ‘Train teachers as educators, not content experts alone, and reward excellence in this field as fully as excellence in biomedical research or clinical practice’. Progress Over the past 30 years, scholars have defined the preparation needed for teaching and other educator roles, and created faculty development delivery systems to train teachers as educators. To reward the excellence of educators, scholars have expanded definitions of scholarship, defined educator roles and criteria for judging excellence, and developed educator portfolios to make achievements visible for peer review. Despite these efforts, the scholarship of discovery continues to be more highly prized and rewarded than the scholarship of teaching. These values are deeply embedded in university culture and policies. Challenges To remedy the structural inequalities between researchers and educators, a holistic approach to rewarding the broad range of educational roles and educational scholarship is needed. This requires strong advocacy to create changes in academic rewards and support policies, provide a clear career trajectory for educators using learning analytics, expand programmes for faculty development, support health professions education scholarship units and academies of medical educators, and create mechanisms to ensure high standards for all educators.

Knowledge Gains and Changing Attitudes from the Anatomy Education Research Institute (AERI 2017): A Mixed Methods Analysis

“…This was seen across all three qualitative questions as well, though most strongly in the “ten words you associate with educational research” question on the post‐conference survey. This theme continues to lend additional support to the need for mentoring and a community of practice as part of a successful faculty development program (Steinert et al, , ; Steinert, ; Irby and O’Sullivan, ). The challenge moving forward will be to continue this community.…”

Medical education: how are we doing?

“…1 For some faculty members, the motivation for teaching comes out of a desire for reward, be it academic promotion, local recognition or financial. 6,7 This was highlighted by Irby et al 4 in Developing and rewarding teachers as educators and scholars: remarkable progress and daunting challenges. Scholarship of discovery, also known as research, continues to be prioritised, funded and rewarded more highly than the scholarship of teaching.…”

“…Recently, the literature has begun to reflect some of this disquiet. [1][2][3] If an academic assessment of competency is only one of the pieces of information upon which a supervisor relies to make decisions in the real world, 4 why are we so wedded to this learner-centric model? In this issue of Medical Education, the article 'Competencybased education: the discourse of infallibility', by Boyd et al, 5 invites the reader to question this apparent monopoly of CBME on the health education dialogue.…”

Development and Implementation of the Inaugural Anatomy Education Research Institute (AERI 2017)

“…However, meta‐analyses of these programs (Steinert et al, ; Steinert, ; Steinert et al, ) have found that many focus solely on teaching skills, while neglecting the research and administrative components of an educator’s position. As a result, there has been a demand (Wilkerson and Irby, ; Steinert, ; Steinert et al, ; Irby and O’Sullivan, ) for such faculty development programs to focus on all aspects of a medical educator’s position, including the research focus (be it bench research or education research).…”

“…Indeed, extensive analyses of successful faculty development programs have found that participants need to have adequate mentorship so as to feel part of a community of practice (Steinert et al, ; Steinert, ; Steinert et al, ; Irby and O’Sullivan, ). This common ground upon which individuals share beliefs and perspectives about education research may help inoculate individuals against perceived lack of respect about this research from members outside the community as reported in the Dickinson et al () survey of International Association of Medical Science Educators (IAMSE) members.…”