Teaching (week 6 of 8)

Active involvement in medical teaching forms another of the key pillars of a medical career. As mentioned in the blog on developing your CV, if you have held a formal teaching role with undergraduate medical students, then emphasize in your CV your key roles and responsibilities and how the experience has helped with your overall career development, e.g. helping your communication skills and helping you keep abreast of new developments. Even if you have not held a formal teaching role, it is likely that you will have had at least some contact with medical students and students from other disciplines on clinical attachments or in delivering occasional lectures and tutorials: think about these experiences and how they have made you a better doctor, and include them in your CV.

Being involved in teaching therefore helps to keep one up to date on new developments and (especially in the case of graduate entry medical programmes) to learn in a two way process about the many different educational backgrounds from where modern medical students come (e.g. different branches of science and the arts).

Teaching also provides a sometimes welcome change and contrast from everyday clinical work and a potential for connection with academic colleagues in the university setting, thus bringing new and alternative clinical perspectives and opportunities for involvement in curriculum development, examining and research. 

Along with improvements in levels of theoretical knowledge and resultant improvements in clinical skills, involvement in medical teaching/education fosters a tendency to engage in more thoughtful and reflective practice, with undoubted improvements in communication skills that are likely to help in working with patients, their families and with colleagues from medical and other backgrounds.

Moreover, while being involved in medical teaching helps keep us abreast of new developments, such involvement can also help us make sense of earlier experiences as a medical student and as a more junior doctor. Sometimes it is only years later that a clinical learning experience starts to make sense and, as the years go by, I have found that there is a tendency to reflect and learn more and more in a retrograde way, based on earlier career experiences. 

Regarding the delivery of teaching, this occurs in a number of ways and with various types of student groups.  In the most classical teaching context, you may be involved in providing didactic lectures for undergraduates in medicine or allied healthcare professions.  Likewise, you may have given didactic or more informal lectures to patient, family or carer groups.  You may have been involved in providing small group tutorials. The likelihood is that you will at least have been involved in having medical students and/or students from other healthcare professions shadow you for their clinical attachments.

A traditional medical teaching context: the lecturer delivers a 

didactic presentation to a large group of passive students

Old fashioned 'bedside teaching': just imagine being the 

unfortunate patient in this scenario

Professor Ronald Harden - a Scottish pioneer in medical education, developing the now widely adopted Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) and the SPICES model of medical education (Student centredness, Problem-based learning, Integrated curricula, Community based learning, Electives with a core and Systematic curricula)



For more detail on the SPICES model, see link below to my brief article on the topic:

https://www.bmj.com/content/339/bmj.b2779

A modern 'Problem Based Learning' (PBL) scenario, with students taking responsibility for their own learning, defining 'learning objectives' and doing their own self-directed reading between sessions 

‘The three Es’ is another simple and useful rule to bear in mind when planning any individual teaching session or course or indeed in any teaching interaction, however informal and passing it might seem. The three Es relate to desirable characteristics of the medical teacher/educator. 

1. Expertise (i.e. know your material well enough so that you can confidently say 'I don't know' if asked a question to which you don't actually know the answer);

2. Enthusiasm (i.e. even if you're tired, bored or stressed, try and convey to your students that what they are learning is important, useful and interesting);

3. Empathy (i.e. with the educational background of your students, so don't set the bar too high or too low in your expectations for what they should know, but tailor your teaching sessions to build on their current knowledge base and gently bring them along to the next level). 

In summary, the more involved you are in teaching in your everyday work (formally or informally) the more reflective you will be in your own practice, with resultant improvements in your levels of background theoretical knowledge, clinical and communication skills.

Therefore, I would encourage you to examine all areas of your career in which you have been involved in medical teaching/education (think tutorials, lectures, clinical attachments, involvement with written and clinical examinations and curriculum development) and summarize these in your CV.  I would also advise that you pursue formal qualifications in medical education such as part-time Postgraduate Diploma or Masters level courses; the field of medical education is rapidly evolving and teaching methods are likely to have changed significantly since your medical student days (depending on how old you are). Signing up for such medical education courses will force you to take time out from normal clinical activity and focus on the principles and practices of medical education. 

Medical education courses will also likely involve the completion of a research project in the area of medical education, thus additionally helping develop your research, analytic and writing skills and possibly providing you with publication opportunities.

Finally, immersing yourself in the world of medical education will also make you a more reflective, thoughtful and effective clinician and help to keep you open minded and humble enough to realize that your learning and development as a doctor is lifelong and never ending.