Identity formation of occasional faculty developers in medical education: a qualitative study

Evolving from Didactic to Dialogic: How to Improve Faculty Development and Support Faculty Developers by Using Action Research

Problem: Since competency-based medical education has gained widespread acceptance to guide curricular reforms, faculty development has been regarded as an indispensable element to make these programs successful. Faculty developers have striven to design and deliver myriad of programs or workshops to better prepare faculty members for fulfilling their teaching roles. However, how faculty developers can improve workshop delivery by researching their teaching practices remains underexplored. Intervention: Action research aims to understand real world practices and advocates for formulation of doable plans through cycles of investigations, and ultimately contributes to claims of knowledge and a progression toward the goal of practice improvement. This methodology aligns with the aim of this study to understand how I could improve a faculty development workshop by researching my teaching practices. Context: In 2016, we conducted four cycles of action research in the context of mini-Clinical Evaluation Exercise (mini-CEX) workshops within a faculty development program aiming for developing teaching and assessment competence in faculty members. We collected multiple sources of qualitative data for thematic analysis, including my reflective journal, field notes taken by a researcher-observer, and post-workshop written reflection and feedback in portfolio from fourteen workshop attendees aiming to develop faculty teaching and assessment competence. Impact: By doing action research, I scrutinized each step as an opportunity for change, enacted adaptive practice and reflection on my teaching practices, and formulated action plans to transform a workshop design through each cycle. In so doing, my workshop evolved from didactic to dialogic with continuous improvement on enhanced engagement, focused discussion and participant empowerment through a collaborative inquiry into feedback practice. Moreover, these processes of action research also supported my growth as a faculty developer. Lessons Learned: The systematic approach of action research serves as a vehicle to enable faculty developers to investigate individual teaching practices as a self-reflective inquiry, to examine, rectify, and transform processes of program delivery, and ultimately introduce themselves as agents for change and improvement.

The Making of an Educator: Professional Identity Formation Among Graduate Medical Education Faculty Through Situated Learning Theory

INTRODUCTION

Professional identity formation (PIF) is a foundational element to professional medical education and training. Given the impact of faculty role models and mentors to student and trainee learning, mapping the landscape of PIF among faculty takes on increased importance. We conducted a scoping review of PIF through the lens of situated learning theory. Our scoping review question was: How is situated learning theory used to understand the process of PIF among graduate medical educators?

METHODS

The scoping review methodology described by Levac et al served as the architecture for this review. Medline, Embase, PubMed, ERIC, CINAHL, PsycINFO, and Web of Science Core Collection were searched (from inception) using a combination of terms that describe PIF among graduate medical educators.

RESULTS

Of the 1434 unique abstracts screened, 129 articles underwent full-text review, with 14 meeting criteria for inclusion and full coding. Significant results organized into three main themes: importance of using common definitions; evolution of theory over time with untapped explanatory power; identity as a dynamic construct.

DISCUSSION

The current body of knowledge leaves many gaps. These include lack of common definitions, need to apply ongoing theoretical insights to research, and exploration of professional identity as an evolving construct. As we come to understand PIF among medical faculty more fully, twin benefits accrue: (1) Community of practices can be designed deliberately to encourage full participation of all graduate medical education faculty who desire it, and (2) Faculty can more effectively lead trainees in negotiating the ongoing process of PIF across the landscape of professional identities.

Do All Roads Lead to Full Participation? Examining Trajectories of Clinical Educators in Graduate Medical Education through Situated Learning Theory

Phenomenon: As new faculty members begin their careers in Graduate Medical Education, each begins a journey of Professional Identity Formation from the periphery of their educational communities. The trajectories traveled vary widely, and full participation in a given educational community is not assured. While some medical school and post-graduate training programs may nurture Professional Identity Formation, there is scant support for faculty. To date, the trajectories that Graduate Medical Education faculty travel, what may derail inbound trajectories, and what tools Graduate Medical Education faculty use to navigate these trajectories have not been explicitly described. We explore these three questions here. Approach: Communities of Practice, a component of Situated Learning Theory, serves as a helpful framework to explore trajectories of educator identity development among Graduate Medical Educators. We used a inductive and deductive approach to Thematic Analysis, with Situated Learning Theory as our interpretive frame. Semi-structured interviews of faculty members of GME programs matriculating into a Health Professions Education Program were conducted, focusing on participants' lived experiences in medical education and how these experiences shaped their Professional Identity Formation. Findings: Participants noted peripheral, inbound, boundary, and outbound trajectories, but not an insider trajectory. Trajectory derailment was attributed to competing demands, imposter syndrome and gendered marginality. Modes of belonging were critical tools participants used to shape PIF, not only engagement with educator roles but disengagement with other roles; imagination of future roles with the support of mentors; and fluid alignment with multiple mutually reinforcing identities. Participants identified boundary objects like resumes and formal roles that helped them negotiate across Community of Practice boundaries. Insights: Despite a desire for full participation, some clinical educators remain marginal, struggling along a peripheral trajectory. Further research exploring this struggle and potential interventions to strengthen modes of belonging and boundary objects is critical to create equitable access to the inbound trajectory for all of our colleagues, leaving the choice of trajectories up to them.

The Effects of Coaching Pediatric Residents on Faculty Coaches' Relationships, Learning, and Professional Identity Formation

PURPOSE

Coaching programs have been implemented in medical education to improve skill development and feedback for trainees. As more faculty take on coaching roles, it is critical to understand how being a coach affects faculty as well as trainees. This study examined the effects of coaching residents on faculty members' relationships, learning, and professional identity formation (PIF), as they move through intersecting communities across landscapes of practice.

METHOD

From July 2020 to January 2021, the authors conducted a mixed-methods study of current and former coaches at 2 institutions with longitudinal pediatric resident coaching programs. They used a concurrent triangulation design in which qualitative and quantitative data were collected simultaneously and integrated during data analysis. A survey explored the impact of coaching on faculty members' learning, relationships, and PIF, and semistructured interviews further examined coaches' experiences. The interview transcripts were analyzed inductively guided by the sensitizing principles of PIF and landscapes of practice.

RESULTS

Of 43 eligible coaches, 32 (74%) completed the survey, and 18 completed interviews. Four themes emerged from the interviews. (1) Coaches' relationships supported belonging in multiple communities. (2) Coaching enabled multidimensional learning. (3) Relationships served as mechanisms of learning for coaches. (4) Coaches' relationships and learning catalyzed PIF. Furthermore, there was a significant difference in the effects of coaching on career growth by faculty rank ( P = .02). Coaches' strengthened PIF increased a sense of purpose, meaning, and professional fulfillment, and inspired new career directions. Survey data further supported these findings.

CONCLUSIONS

Being a coach deepened faculty members' professional identities through their varied relationships, multidimensional learning, and sense of belonging in intersecting communities. This study introduces a framework to understand the factors mediating coaches' PIF and highlights how investing in coaching leads to important benefits for coaches.

Participation in a Resident-as-Teacher Rotation: Motivations of and Impacts on Faculty Coaches

PURPOSE

Coaching in medical education is increasingly used for trainee development for a variety of skills, including improving trainee teaching skills through resident-as-teacher programs. Faculty who serve as coaches commit significant effort to the coaching role, often without protected time or support. Little is known about faculty motivations to participate in coaching programs or how the coaching experience affects the faculty. This study explored faculty coaches' motivations to participate as coaches in a resident-as-teacher rotation and the impacts they experienced as a result of their participation.

METHOD

In this qualitative study, authors conducted 14 semistructured interviews in 2019 with faculty coaches from a single resident-as-teacher program in Boston, Massachusetts. Authors analyzed the transcripts using thematic analysis to develop a conceptual framework.

RESULTS

Faculty coaches' motivations for initial participation included a sense of honor; a sense of duty; perception of competence; interest in promoting medical education; and desire for increased connectedness. These motivations all related to a larger theme of educator identity. Coaches identified 3 main impacts from participation: improvement in their own teaching, personal satisfaction from helping others and seeing improvement in their learners, and increased connectedness. These impacts affirmed the coaches' educator identity and led to ongoing motivation to participate. They also contributed to the coaches' well-being at work.

CONCLUSIONS

Faculty were initially motivated to participate as coaches in a resident-as-teacher rotation based on their identity as educators. The benefits achieved-improvement in own teaching, personal satisfaction, and increased connectedness-affirmed their educator identity and led to ongoing participation and increased well-being at work. These motivations and impacts are important to consider as future programs are developed and coaches are recruited for programs across undergraduate, graduate, and continuing medical education settings.

Collaborative faculty development transforms evaluation at a school of osteopathic medicine: an exploratory grounded theory study

Background: Faculty development (FD) initiatives for medical educators must keep pace with educators’ expanding roles and responsibilities in the 21st century to effectively support and guide professional growth. Successful initiatives will be comprehensive and systematic, rather than episodic. Our research explores the impact of a collaborative, individualized, and focused FD program. The purpose of this pilot study is: (1) to describe the innovative design and implementation of the incipient FD program at University of the Incarnate Word School of Osteopathic Medicine (UIWSOM), San Antonio, Texas; and (2) to present insights from a preliminary process evaluation of the program’s initial launch to inform and facilitate broadscale implementation.      Methods: We used a longitudinal, holistic approach to redesign the UIWSOM FD program to provide evidence-informed and experiential learning for faculty. We performed a process evaluation of the initial iteration of the FD program using an inductive qualitative research approach. We applied principles of constructivist grounded theory to analyze faculty’s responses collected during semi-structured interviews. Results: Three themes emerged from our analysis: communication, advocacy, and reciprocal learning.  We found that effective communication, advocacy for faculty success, and reciprocal value between faculty and program developers undergirded the core concept of authentic engagement.  Faculty’s perceptions of the quality of engagement of those implementing the program overshadowed the quality of the logistics.  Conclusions: Our pilot study identified authentic engagement as critical to faculty’s positive experience of this new FD initiative.  Practical implications for other health professions schools with similar FD initiatives include consideration of the relational aspects.  Future studies should expand the process evaluation to determine key factors driving perceived program success for other skill domains and amongst clinical faculty, and include a long-range outcome evaluation of the fully implemented program.

Uncovering the ecology of clinical education: a dramaturgical study of informal learning in clinical teams

Off-the-job faculty development for clinical teachers has been blighted by poor attendance, unsatisfactory sustainability, and weak impact. The faculty development literature has attributed these problems to the marginalisation of the clinical teacher role in host institutions. By focusing on macro-organisational factors, faculty development is ignoring the how clinical teachers are shaped by their everyday participation in micro-organisations such as clinical teams. We set out to explore how the roles of clinical teacher and graduate learner are co-constructed in the context of everyday work in clinical teams. Using an ethnographic study design we carried out marginal participant observation of four different hospital clinical teams. We assembled a dataset comprising field notes, participant interviews, images, and video, which captured day-to-day working and learning encounters between team members. We applied the dramaturgical sensitising concepts of impression management and face work to a thematic analysis of the dataset. We found that learning in clinical teams was largely informal. Clinical teachers modelled, but rarely articulated, an implicit curriculum of norms, standards and expectations. Trainees sought to establish legitimacy and credibility for themselves by creating impressions of being able to recognise and reproduce lead clinicians' standards. Teachers and trainees colluded in using face work strategies to sustain favourable impressions but, in so doing, diminished learning opportunities and undermined educational dialogue. These finding suggest that there is a complex interrelationship between membership of clinical teams and clinical learning. The implication for faculty development is that it needs to move beyond its current emphasis on the structuring effects of institutional context to a deeper consideration of how teacher and learner roles are co-constructed in clinical teams.

Educator Identity Formation: A Faculty Development Workshop

INTRODUCTION

Health professions faculty members often struggle deciding on career paths balancing their identities as clinicians, educators, and scholars. Identity formation research has identified three major influences: context, roles, and agency. Identity influences career decisions and, in turn, affects engagement in medical education and faculty development. We designed a single-session workshop to foster educator identity formation.

METHODS

The workshop varied from 1 to 3 hours. It explored how identity develops and considered how self, role, and context could be shaped to grow and sustain identity. Participants used a handout called Identity Quakes to indicate satisfaction with their support, engagement, and empowerment. The workshop employed direct instruction to provide language and tools to scaffold conversation and self-reflection leading to future plans aligning participants' professional identities and roles with resources to support further development.

RESULTS

From 2016 to 2020, we offered the workshop to faculty members from diverse professions, including medicine, nursing, dentistry, physical therapy, and others, on 11 occasions (locally, nationally, and internationally) with audiences of 15-200 participants. At offerings that collected evaluations, the workshop received high ratings of 4.61-4.90 (very good-excellent) on a 5-point scale.

DISCUSSION

This single-session workshop is a valuable opportunity to reflect on identity, which faculty members rarely get to do formally. The Identity Quakes handout prompts participants to challenge their assumptions about their professional identities and roles, employ their agency/choice, and consider future career choices.

Becoming outstanding educators: What do they say contributed to success?

Aspiring medical educators and their advisors often lack clarity about career paths. To provide guidance to faculty pursuing careers as educators, we sought to explore perceived factors that contributed to the career development of outstanding medical educators. Using a thematic analysis, investigators at two institutions interviewed 39 full or associate professor physician faculty with prominent roles as medical educators in 2016. The social cognitive career theory (SCCT) informed the interview guide. Investigators developed the codebook and performed iterative analysis using qualitative methods. Extensive team discussion generated the final themes. Eight themes emerged related to preparation, early successes, mentors, networks, faculty development, balance, work environment, and multiple identities. Preparation led to early successes, which served as "launch points," while mentors, networks, and faculty development programs served as career accelerators to open more opportunities, and a supportive work environment was an additional enabler of this pathway. Educators who reported balance between work and outside interests described boundary setting as well as selectively choosing new opportunities to establish boundaries in mid-career. Participants described multiple professional identities, and clinician and educator identities tended to merge and reinforce each other as careers progressed. This study revealed common themes describing trajectories of success among medical educators. These themes aligned with the SCCT, and typically replayed and spiraled over the course of the educators' careers. These findings resonate with other studies, lending credence to an approach to career development that can be shared with junior faculty who are exploring careers in medical education.

Factors predicting identity as educators and openness to improve: an exploratory study

CONTEXT

Researchers suggest that teachers' work environment affects their sense of connectedness and appreciation, which affects their educator identity. However, sessional (also known as adjunct, clinical, contingent and non-tenured) faculty members may struggle with their educator identity. The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine the extent to which perceived connectedness and received appreciation predicted identity as a medical (health care science) educator and openness to improve in tenure-track and sessional faculty members.

METHODS

We utilised an 'identification with teaching' scale to measure medical educator identity. We developed scales to measure perceived connectedness to university department, openness to improve teaching, and appreciation as a motivation to try a new teaching method. We then hypothesised a path model between these constructs. We surveyed faculty members at a health sciences school and performed confirmatory factor analyses and structural equation modelling using data from a sample of 73 tenure-track and 146 sessional faculty members to explore support for the hypothesised model.

RESULTS

Connectedness and appreciation predicted identity as a medical educator and openness to improve in different ways for sessional and tenure-track faculty members. For tenure-track faculty members, appreciation predicted medical educator identity and openness to improve, whereas a sense of connectedness trended towards predicting an openness to improve. For sessional faculty members, connectedness to their department predicted their identity as a medical educator, which acted as a mediator to predict an openness to improve.

DISCUSSION

Our data supported the hypothesised model, but the sessional and tenure-track faculty models differed in strength and focus. We explore reasons for these differences based on the working environment of each teacher type. We suggest that the two models partially explain the transformation from 'a clinician who teaches' to a medical educator. Finally, we make suggestions for how identity as a medical educator and openness to improve may be encouraged in both types of teachers.

Strengthening Teachers' Professional Identities Through Faculty Development

Although medical schools espouse a commitment to the educational mission, faculty members often struggle to develop and maintain their identities as teachers. Teacher identity is important because it can exert a powerful influence on career choice, academic roles and responsibilities, and professional development opportunities. However, most faculty development initiatives focus on knowledge and skill acquisition rather than the awakening or strengthening of professional identity. The goal of this Perspective is to highlight the importance of faculty members' professional identities as teachers, explore how faculty development programs and activities can support teachers' identities, and describe specific strategies that can be used in professional development. These strategies include the embedding of identity and identity formation into existing offerings by asking questions related to identity, incorporating identity in longitudinal programs, building opportunities for community building and networking, promoting reflection, and capitalizing on mentorship. Stand-alone faculty development activities focusing on teachers' identities can also be helpful, as can a variety of approaches that advocate for organizational change and institutional support. To achieve excellence in teaching and learning, faculty members need to embrace their identities as teachers and be supported in doing so by their institutions and by faculty development.

Tensions in integrating clinician and educator role identities: a qualitative study with occupational therapists and physiotherapists

OBJECTIVE

Clinician educators (CEs) frequently report tensions in their professional identities as clinicians and educators, although some perceive a reciprocal relationship between clinical and teaching roles. However, it is unknown if the shared meanings of clinicians' multiple job roles translate to identity verification. We sought to examine CEs' perceptions of their clinician and educator roles and the influence of their perceptions on the salience of their professional identities.

DESIGN

Qualitative individual interviews and focus groups, analysed using framework analytic approach.

SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS

23 occupational therapy (OT) and 16 physiotherapy (PT) educators from two acute hospitals and one rehabilitation unit in Singapore.

RESULTS

PT and OT CEs constructed shared meanings of their clinician and educator roles through overcoming feelings of unease and inadequacy, discovering commonalities and establishing relevance. However, shared meanings between clinician and educator roles might not necessarily lead to mutual verification of their professional identities. Individuals' cognitive flexibility and openness to additional roles, and organisations' expectations had a mediating effect on the identity integration process. Less experienced CEs reported feelings of distress juggling the competing demands of both clinician and educator roles, whereas more experienced CEs appeared to be more capable of prioritising their job roles in different situations, which could be a result of differences in adaptation to frequent interruptions in clinical setting. Emphasis on patient statistics could result in failure in achieving identity verification, leading to feelings of distress.

CONCLUSION

Faculty developers should take into consideration the episodic nature of the educator identity construction process and develop induction programmes to assist CEs in building integrated identities.

Along the Axes of Difference: Setting Scholarship and Practice Agendas for Faculty Development

The rise of academic clinical education programs underlines the growing influence of faculty development on how health care is taught and therefore practiced. Research to date has outlined the rapid rise of these postgraduate qualifications and their impact on their graduates' professional identities. Given the scale and nature of the change, it is worth considering these programs from a broader perspective. "Axes of difference" are invoked to chart the tensions and intersections between various social identities that form distinctive features of clinical education. Six axes are described: patients-clinicians, trainees-trainers, classrooms-clinics, uniprofessional-interprofessional, local-global, and teachers-clinicians. These reveal a range of complexities about faculty development, which can inform both practice and scholarship agendas.

How Mentor Identity Evolves: Findings From a 10-Year Follow-up Study of a National Professional Development Program

PURPOSE

Despite academic medicine's endorsement of professional development and mentoring, little is known about what junior faculty learn about mentoring in implicit curricula of professional development programs, and how their mentor identity evolves in this context. The authors explored what faculty-participants in the Educational Scholars Program implicitly learned about mentoring and how the implicit curriculum affected mentor identity transformation.

METHOD

Semistructured interviews with 19 of 36 former faculty-participants were conducted in 2016. Consistent with constructivist grounded theory, data collection and analysis overlapped. The authors created initial codes informed by Ibarra's model for identity transformation, iteratively revised codes based on incoming data patterns, and created visual representations of relationships amongst codes to gain a holistic, shared understanding of the data.

RESULTS

In the implicit curriculum, faculty-participants learned the importance of having multiple mentors, the value of peer mentors, and the incremental process of becoming a mentor. The authors used Ibarra's model to understand how the implicit curriculum worked to transform mentor identity: Faculty-participants reported observing mentors, experimenting with different ways to mentor and to be a mentor, and evaluating themselves as mentors.

CONCLUSIONS

The Educational Scholars Program's implicit curriculum facilitated faculty-participants taking on mentor identity via opportunities it afforded to watch mentors, experiment with mentoring, and evaluate self as mentor, key ingredients for identity construction. Leaders of professional development programs can develop faculty as mentors by capitalizing on what faculty-participants learn in the implicit curriculum and deliberately structuring postgraduation mentoring opportunities.

Medicine as a Community of Practice: Implications for Medical Education

The presence of a variety of independent learning theories makes it difficult for medical educators to construct a comprehensive theoretical framework for medical education, resulting in numerous and often unrelated curricular, instructional, and assessment practices. Linked with an understanding of identity formation, the concept of communities of practice could provide such a framework, emphasizing the social nature of learning. Individuals wish to join the community, moving from legitimate peripheral to full participation, acquiring the identity of community members and accepting the community's norms.Having communities of practice as the theoretical basis of medical education does not diminish the value of other learning theories. Communities of practice can serve as the foundational theory, and other theories can provide a theoretical basis for the multiple educational activities that take place within the community, thus helping create an integrated theoretical approach.Communities of practice can guide the development of interventions to make medical education more effective and can help both learners and educators better cope with medical education's complexity. An initial step is to acknowledge the potential of communities of practice as the foundational theory. Educational initiatives that could result from this approach include adding communities of practice to the cognitive base; actively engaging students in joining the community; creating a welcoming community; expanding the emphasis on explicitly addressing role modeling, mentoring, experiential learning, and reflection; providing faculty development to support the program; and recognizing the necessity to chart progress toward membership in the community.

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

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.

Identity formation and motivation of new faculty developers: A replication study in a resource constrained university

INTRODUCTION

Previous studies on the identity development and motivation of faculty developers have occurred with seasoned developers in a research-rich environment. We sought to determine if the findings of those studies could be replicated with novice faculty developers in a resource-constrained environment.

METHODS

We interviewed 15 novice faculty developers from Muhimbili University of Health and Allied Sciences (MUHAS) who, at the time, had led faculty development activities for no more than two years. We conducted a qualitative analysis sensitized by the previous findings.

RESULTS

Results were very similar to the previous work. The developers described compartmentalized, hierarchical, and merged identities. The impact was on their teaching as well as on others at MUHAS and on the institution itself. The motivations related to mastery, purpose, duty, satisfaction, and relatedness.

CONCLUSION

This replication led us to conclude that identity development as a faculty developer occurs even in novice developers who do faculty development as only part of their work and despite constrained resources and a different culture. These developers find the work richly rewarding and their motivations benefit the institution. This body of research highlights how faculty development provides benefits to the institution as well as engaging career opportunities.

A systematic review of faculty development initiatives designed to enhance teaching effectiveness: A 10-year update: BEME Guide No. 40

BACKGROUND

This review, which focused on faculty development initiatives designed to improve teaching effectiveness, synthesized findings related to intervention types, study characteristics, individual and organizational outcomes, key features, and community building.

METHODS

This review included 111 studies (between 2002 and 2012) that met the review criteria.

FINDINGS

Overall satisfaction with faculty development programs was high. Participants reported increased confidence, enthusiasm, and awareness of effective educational practices. Gains in knowledge and skills, and self-reported changes in teaching behaviors, were frequently noted. Observed behavior changes included enhanced teaching practices, new educational initiatives, new leadership positions, and increased academic output. Organizational changes were infrequently explored. Key features included evidence-informed educational design, relevant content, experiential learning, feedback and reflection, educational projects, intentional community building, longitudinal program design, and institutional support.

CONCLUSION

This review holds implications for practice and research. Moving forward, we should build on current success, broaden the focus beyond individual teaching effectiveness, develop programs that extend over time, promote workplace learning, foster community development, and secure institutional support. We should also embed studies in a theoretical framework, conduct more qualitative and mixed methods studies, assess behavioral and organizational change, evaluate transfer to practice, analyse key features, and explore the role of faculty development within the larger organizational context.

What motivates occasional faculty developers to lead faculty development workshops? A qualitative study

PURPOSE

The demand for faculty development is ongoing, and many medical schools will need to expand their pool of faculty developers to include physicians and scientists whose primary expertise is not education. Insight into what motivates occasional faculty developers can guide recruitment and retention strategies. This study was designed to understand the motivations of faculty developers who occasionally (one to three times each year) lead faculty development workshops.

METHOD

Qualitative data were collected in March and April 2012 from interviews with faculty developers who occasionally taught workshops from 2007 to 2012 in the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine's faculty development program. The interviews were audiotaped and transcribed. The authors thematically analyzed the transcripts using a general inductive approach and developed codes sensitized by motivation theories.

RESULTS

The authors interviewed 29/30 (97%) occasional faculty developers and identified five themes: mastery (desire to learn and develop professionally), relatedness (enjoyment of working with and learning from others), duty (sense of obligation to give back and be a good academic citizen), purpose (commitment to improving local teaching and ultimately patient care), and satisfaction (fun and enjoyment).

CONCLUSIONS

Four of the themes the authors found are well addressed in motivation theory literature: mastery, relatedness, duty, and purpose. Whereas these four are motivators for occasional faculty developers, it is the fifth theme-satisfaction-that the authors feel is foundational and links the others together. Armed with this understanding, individuals leading faculty development programs can develop strategies to recruit and retain occasional faculty developers.