Best Practices in Teaching Residents on Internal Medicine Wards

Abstract

This article was migrated. The article was not marked as recommended. Background: Faculty development in clinical teaching can be challenging due to time constraints with limitations of evaluative and educational processes. Purpose: The objective was to determine what residents value most in clinical teachers and if the Stanford Faculty Development Programs' (SFDP) evaluation tool captures all important items. Methods: We analyzed three years of learner comments according to 52 teacher themes. Forty-nine themes came from a contemporary, comprehensive literature review. Three novel themes were added based upon a faculty survey. Wilcoxon's rank-sum tests were used to compare each theme between the highest and lowest rated faculty. A linear regression model was utilized to determine how well the SFDP evaluation categories correlated with a single-item measure of overall teaching effectiveness for each theme calculating differences between observed and predicted scores (residuals). In order to identify whether any of the themes contribute to overall teaching effectiveness, but were not captured by the SFDP tool, we used Spearman's coefficients to assess the correlation between the residuals, the seven SFDP categories, and the 52 themes. Results: Eight themes were significantly different between the lowest and highest rated faculty. These themes included: "practices evidence-based medicine," "shows enthusiasm for medicine," "dedicates time to teaching," "demonstrates enthusiasm for teaching," "supervised adequately," "demonstrates knowledge of teaching skills," stimulates or inspires trainees' thinking," and "acts as a role model." The regression model explained 93.5% of the variability in the single-item scores between the two groups. Two themes ("is efficient and "acts as a role model") were significantly correlated with the residuals from the regression model. However, both correlated with at least one SFDP category. Conclusions: Residents value certain teaching themes more highly than others, and these should be emphasized in faculty development. The SFDP tool excels in capturing good teaching traits.