Teaching Psychiatric Residents to Teach

Abstract

Teaching other residents and medical students is one of the primary activities of psychiatric residents, yet most receive minimal or no formal training or supervision on how to teach. This report describes a Teaching Day Workshop, designed and implemented by residents at the Massachusetts General Hospital with the support of their faculty and an educational consultant, as one model to introduce the concepts and techniques of teaching to psychiatric residents. The participating residents were unanimous in their positive appraisal of the workshop, and they recommended that additional seminars on teaching be integrated into the residency's core curriculum. Ways that the Teaching Day Workshop can be adapted for use by other residency training programs are discussed. The authors believe that teaching residents to be better teachers can have an impact on recruitment of medical students into psychiatry and psychiatric residents into careers in academic psychiatry.

A systematic review of resident-as-teacher programmes

“…Obstetrics and gynaecology residents were represented in six of 29 papers and four papers described teacher‐training interventions directed at residents in surgical specialties, either general surgery or orthopaedic surgery 26–29 . One paper investigated the effectiveness of training psychiatry residents to be clinical teachers 30 . Eleven of the 29 studies included residents from more than one clinical discipline and of these four did not list the involved specialties.…”

“…Five studies described the specific ways authors used to establish resident learning needs prior to their studies. Four studies outlined results of pre‐intervention surveys, questionnaires and interviews used for needs assessment and for ascertaining residents’ interests in improving their teaching skills 27,30,36,47 . The fifth study referred to results from a previous smaller pilot study at the same institution which had shown potentially positive results from resident teaching programmes 44 …”

“…1,47 The remaining two of the 29 studies were descriptive case series. 30,43 Three of the reviewed studies did not use any pre-and post-intervention outcome comparisons. 1,27,47 Data collection methods…”

“…[26][27][28][29] One paper investigated the effectiveness of training psychiatry residents to be clinical teachers. 30 Eleven of the 29 studies included residents from more than one clinical discipline and of these four did not list the involved specialties.…”

“…Several studies also set out to investigate whether teaching programmes made a positive impact on the self-reported attitudes and perceptions of teacherresidents. 1,4,17,29,30,[38][39][40][41][42][43] One study commented on the inter-relationships between individual teaching ability and style of interpersonal behaviour. 4…”