Teaching Responsibilities

 

My teaching responsibilities have varied over the years; in part, due to my own development as a physician and as a postrgraduate medical trainee, and in part, due to the opportunities that have become available as I have become progressively more involved in medical education.

 

I have been fortunate enough to have been given the opportunity to teach learners at different levels of training, from pre-clinical medical students, to residents in paediatrics, family medicine and other residency training programs. More recently, I have helped facilitate and deliver presentations to clinical and research fellows as well as faculty in a variety of paediatric subspecialties, thus helping them fulfill part of their continuing medical education commitments at weekly academic meetings. Identifying learning objectives for learners at multiple levels has been a challenge that I have embraced, as it continually allows me to re-assess my goals, expectations, and instructional strategies, dependent on the learners' development within a given context, in keeping with the concept of Grow's (1991) staged self-directed learning model.

 

As a developing medical educator and clinician, I have also come to realize the progressive responsibility of planning and delivering high quality care and the need to involve more junior trainees in contributing and collaborating in this process, balanced with their similarly important need of pursuing their own interests in a limited amount of time. My primary commitment to teaching has occurred in the clinical setting of inpatient paediatric care, where such challenges often arise. Additionally, I am also involved in teaching in a variety of other settings, and with groups ranging dramatically in size.

 

My largest teaching responsibilities as a paediatric resident were tied to the paediatric clerkship, where I conducted a number of lectures and sessions for the third year medical student interns rotating through these eight-week rotations, in addition to clinical teaching during inpatient care. Through my teaching initiatives and involvement in their medical education, I had the satisfaction of assisting them in developing increasing independence and interest in paediatric care. As a more junior clinical fellow, I had the privilege of working with residents and medical students, stimulating me to grow my knowledge and skills in paediatric gastroenterology to be able to provide better guidance in their medical education on the inpatient/consult service. Now, as a more senior fellow, I have begun to branch out more in my teaching responsibilities, as I had previously done as a senior resident.

 

I have organized my teaching responsibilities in the following sections, which you can navigate by selecting the associated buttons. I begin with a general overview of my primary activities in undergraduate and postgraduate medical education. Other teaching activities will be briefly mentioned, before summarizing these responsibilities over the years in a more traditional dossier format, with reflections on my undergraduate medical education involvement incorporated into a teaching log.