The Health Professions Education Pathway: Preparing Students, Residents, and Fellows to Become Future Educators

Abstract

Problem Training the next generation of health professionals requires leaders, innovators, and scholars in education. Although many medical schools and residencies offer education electives or tracks focused on developing teaching skills, these programs often omit educational innovation, scholarship, and leadership and are narrowly targeted to one level of learner. Intervention The University of California San Francisco created the Health Professions Education Pathway for medical students, residents, and fellows as well as learners from other health professional schools. The Pathway applies the theoretical framework of communities of practice in its curricular design to promote learner identity formation as future health professions educators. It employs the strategies of engagement, imagination, and alignment for identity formation. Context Through course requirements, learners engage and work with members of the educator community of practice to develop the knowledge and skills required to participate in the community. Pathway instructors are faculty members who model a breadth of educator careers to help learners imagine personal trajectories. Last, learners complete mentored education projects, adopting scholarly methods and ethics to align with the broader educator community of practice. Outcome From 2009 to 2014, 117 learners participated in the Pathway. Program evaluations, graduate surveys, and web-based searches revealed positive impacts on learner career development. Learners gained knowledge and skills for continued engagement with the educator community of practice, confirmed their career aspirations (imagination), joined an educator-in-training community (engagement/imagination), and disseminated via scholarly meetings and peer-reviewed publications (alignment). Lessons Learned Learners identified engagement with the learner community as the most powerful aspect of the Pathway; it provided peer support for imagining and navigating the development of their dual identities in the clinician and educator communities of practice. Also important for learner success was alignment of their projects with the goals of the local educator community of practice. Our community of practice approach to educator career development has shown promising early outcomes by nurturing learners' passion for teaching; expanding their interest in educational leadership, innovation, and scholarship; and focusing on their identity formation as future educators.

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

“…To recruit educators into academic careers, a clear career pathway needs to be shown to students and residents whose identities are being formed during training. Some schools make this career option transparent through scholarly concentration on medical or health professions education for students and residents . At the faculty member level a similar process is required.…”

“…Some schools make this career option transparent through scholarly concentration on medical or health professions education for students and residents. 85,86 At the faculty member level a similar process is required. Many schools offer development certification programmes for faculty members, as well as longitudinal teaching programmes for health professions education scholars.…”

Sustained effects of faculty leadership development modules for clinical instructors of core competences education in Taiwan: a four-year explanatory case study

“…In general, educational leaders in CC education tend to be high teaching-performance teachers as opposed to low teachingperformance teachers. Baroffio et al have suggested that the ideal leadership FD program will to help the teaching performance and leadership of low teaching-performance teachers [33]. Engagement and serial evaluations have been reported as successful strategies for improving the teaching performance of low teaching-performance faculty [34,35].…”

Medical students’ professional identity development from being actors in an objective structured teaching exercise

“…Exploring the development of medical students' identities as learners and teachers, and inviting students to join training activities involving larger communities of teachers may be a promising approach. It may expose students to the challenges and skills needed to be both learners and teachers while providing support for the development of their dual identities in both the clinician and teaching communities of practice (Chen et al 2017).…”