What Questions Guide Investing in Our Faculty?

Abstract

After a recent faculty development workshop, a participant emailed me this message: “Thank you for setting this up. It helped open my mind.” While the comment may be vague, the faculty developer in me probably wants to celebrate the success of the workshop. Yet, as a researcher, I immediately begin to ponder many questions raised by this comment, such as, What in the workshop opened the individual’s mind, what does it mean to have a mind open, will it stay open, and what will the faculty member do with this open mind to enhance learning? Medical education research has a rich history that has helped us understand the role of faculty development from providing skills to enhancing work satisfaction to meeting the demands of ever-changing pedagogy and assessment approaches.1 When speaking of faculty development, we draw from Steinert, who defines faculty development to include all the activities faculty members pursue to improve their knowledge, skills, and behaviors as teachers and educators, leaders and managers, and researchers and scholars, in both individual and group settings.2 Literature exists reporting characteristics of workshops and facilitators, the type of faculty who participate, etc.3–8 One might surmise that there is little left to study except to tweak these opportunities to better engage more faculty members and to make sure the newly learned skills stick. Yet, new questions arise, requiring study to aid faculty to face the many challenges that exist in teaching today. Faculty are at the heart of medical education, and we owe them the necessary research to ensure that they are appropriately supported for their continuous growth and for meeting the needs of our learners and educational programs. So what questions should guide this investment in faculty? Questions are endless once a researcher commits to this investment. One way to manage these questions is to apply a research framework developed specifically to study faculty development, such as the one proposed by my colleague Dave Irby and myself.9 Our framework argues that the research should focus around 4 components of programs, participants, facilitators, and context as they exist within the teaching commons and within the workplace community. Critical, unanswered questions emerge when considering these components that will affect the investment in faculty. For programs, research questions should address the development of appropriate learning activities in the workplace. For participants, important research questions center around identity and how that identity is sustained in the workplace. For facilitators, we must ask questions about the coach/mentor for educators in the workplace. Finally, context is critical, and research questions must focus on the relationships between institutional, both academic and health systems, and faculty members. We can explore these components as researchers to ensure the appropriate investment in our faculty. The changing environment challenges our way of studying programs, which often centered on traditional teaching methods in familiar settings such as classroom-based learning or clinical precepting. New circumstances spark questions such as, How are we preparing faculty for the changing pedagogy needed as the clinical environment changes? A simple example comes from robotic surgery. How do we prepare the faculty to teach learners in this environment when there are physical limitations concerning participation? What are legitimate activities for students in this increasingly common robotic operating room? The answers may be to imbue programs with strategic thinking where the emphasis is on how to apply educational knowledge in the actual situation.10 As such, the return on investment in faculty development is based not on improvement in skills but, rather, on faculty members’ growth and expansion of skills to meet these new learning situations. In general, to design an optimal learning environment, much more research is r