Teaching the Teacher: Novel Faculty Development for VA Hospitalists
Background: The US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is the largest educator of health professions trainees in the country, but the roles and responsibilities of the modern clinician educator are increasingly challenging and complex. Most VA academic hospitalists with access to professional and faculty development receive it through academic affiliates. Many VA hospitalists lack this option, and teaching within the VA is unique given its specific health system, clinical environments, and patient population.
Observations: Teaching the Teacher is a facilitation-based educational series for inpatient hospitalists at VA medical centers that is tailored to self-reported needs and provides faculty development through the lens of VA medicine. The transition from in-person to synchronous virtual programming allowed for wider dissemination of the program, and to date, 10 VA hospitalist sections across the country have participated in the series.
Conclusions: VA clinicians want and deserve dedicated training to optimize their confidence and skills in their roles as health professions educators. Teaching the Teacher is a pilot faculty development program that has met success based on its goal of meeting the specific needs of VA clinician educators in hospital medicine. It has the potential to serve as a model for clinical educator onboarding and to allow for the rapid spread of best teaching practices among clinical educators.
Limitations and Future Directions
There are several limitations to this preliminary study. Participation at each site was voluntary and did not always reach the full potential audience of hospitalist clinician educators. As one participant stated, future directions include doing “more to involve teachers who need to learn [these skills]. The ones who attended [from our institution] were already the best teachers.” In addition, despite the asynchronous option, lack of protected time for faculty development may be a limiting factor in participation. Support from institutional and national leadership would likely improve participation.
Measured endpoints to date consist primarily of participant satisfaction and do not yet capture objective changes in teaching. Data collection is ongoing to assess immediate and longitudinal changes in confidence and behaviors of attendees and how this might affect their health professions learners.
Last, our initial needs assessment only targeted academic hospitalists, and the needs of VA hospitalists in rural areas or at facilities without academic affiliation may be different. More research is needed to understand the diverse faculty that comprises both urban and rural VA sites, what their professional development needs are, and how those needs can be met.
Conclusions
Teaching the Teacher is a faculty development pilot, tailored to meet the needs of VA hospitalist clinician educators, that has been voluntarily adopted at multiple VA sites. The facilitated discussion format allows participants to guide the conversation and personalize content, thereby promoting a culture of discussing challenges and best practices among colleagues that we hope endures beyond the bounds of the curriculum. The program focuses on elevating the specific teaching mission of the VA and could be incorporated into onboarding and regular VA-sponsored faculty development updates. While Teaching the Teacher was originally developed for VA hospitalists, most of the content is applicable to clinicians outside hospital medicine. This project serves as a model for training clinical educators and has opportunities to expand across VA as a customizable didactic platform.
Acknowledgments
We thank Brian Schneider, MD, for his tireless support of this program, as well as all the VA clinicians who have shared their time, talents, and wisdom with us since this program’s inception.
