Eileen CichoskiKelly, Ph.D., and colleagues at other medical schools often talk about the need for faculty to trumpet their accomplishments as teachers in the classroom – versus just promoting their clinical or basic science research.
Eileen CichoskiKelly, Ph.D. (Photo: UVM COM Design & Photography)
Eileen CichoskiKelly, Ph.D., and colleagues at other medical schools often talk about the need for faculty to trumpet their accomplishments as teachers in the classroom – versus just promoting their clinical or basic science research.
Medical researchers at the University of Vermont and elsewhere often focus on the laboratory studies they publish in scientific journals, but their work with medical students is equally promotion-worthy. Many could benefit from mentors who can assist them with documenting and communicating about their medical education efforts, says CichoskiKelly, director of educational instruction and scholarship and an associate professor of family medicine at the UVM College of Medicine.
“We’re all curricular folks,” CichoskiKelly says. “We want to help faculty make the bridge that when you’re teaching, that’s scholarship, too.”
With a new two-year grant from the Northeast Group on Educational Affairs (NeGEA), one of four regional groups in the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) that focuses on professional development of medical educators, CichoskiKelly plans to build a model for mentorship in medical education research.
One of the goals of the grant is collaboration between institutions, which include Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., and Bay State College in Boston.
“If we’re successful with this, we’ll have a model that any school anywhere can use,” CichoskiKelly says.
She hopes the project will enhance the efforts of the Teaching Academy, the College of Medicine’s program to support educators and encourage their collaboration and skill development. Ideally, the model will show faculty ways to tout the strengths of the College of Medicine’s curriculum.
One way might be the AAMC’s MedEdPortal, which allows faculty to submit teaching techniques for peer review and publishing. Many medical school instructors don’t know the portal exists, CichoskiKelly says.
UVM could share so much about its cutting-edge medical education, CichoskiKelly says. For example, she says, Ellen Black, Ph.D., an assistant professor of neurological sciences and course director and instructor for the Human Structure and Function first-year anatomy course, incorporates peer-teaching and allows students to assess and evaluate one another. The Generations course in reproduction, development and aging taught by Charlotte Reback, M.D., associate professor of family medicine, also is unique, CichoskiKelly says.
At UVM, Donna O’Malley, M.L.S., systems coordinator for the Dana Medical Library, also is working under the grant to search the literature in mentorship research. The grant participants want to find not just guidelines on being a successful mentor, but on helping scientists look outside their fields.
She and her colleagues plan to convene a panel of experts to tell them what makes a good advisor in this area of medical education research, what works in the mentor relationship and how it differs from other types of mentorship.
“Nobody’s actually studied it to try to identify those features, and that’s what we’re trying to do,” CichoskiKelly says. “My hypothesis is there is a different skill set, because you’re trying to take people out of their comfort zone.”