Presented By: Alana Newell, Baylor College of Medicine
Co-Authors: Alison Haddock, Baylor College of Medicine
Purpose
Since 1995, Baylor College of Medicine has offered a two-year-long faculty development program - the Master Teachers Fellowship Program (MTFP) - to enhance faculty skills as educators, educational scholars, and education leaders. By transitioning to a competency instead of time-based approach, we hope to enhance faculty competencies in alignment with national educator standards. Using advisory committee feedback and existing programmatic priorities, we identified five program competencies and participants choose three additional competencies for targeted program support. This in-progress work investigates the effectiveness of this precision competency-based approach.
Methods
The ACGME (Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education) Clinician Educator Milestone competencies for MTFP are: Reflective Practice and Commitment to Personal Growth, Teaching and Facilitating Learning, Science of Learning, and Medical Education Scholarship. We also developed a milestone, Fostering Educational Community. At the kickoff of the 2023-2025 MTFP program, 11 faculty member fellows with diverse backgrounds self-assessed their proficiency on the MTFP milestones (Novice=1 to Expert=5) and three additional self-selected milestones aligned with their current professional goals. We then used self-assessment outcomes to build MTFP monthly sessions.
Results
Teaching and Facilitating Learning (M=2.95) had the highest self-ratings, and Science of Learning (M=1.97) the lowest. Fellows self-rated slightly higher on self-selected competencies (M= 2.45) than required (M=2.38), though it varied greatly. Learner Assessment, for example had higher than average self-ratings (N=4; M=3.13), while Feedback (N=5; M=1.80) had lower. Initial sessions tailored to the MTFP competencies, based on fellows' self-ratings, have shown early effectiveness at addressing the competencies and building their knowledge.
Conclusions
We continue to explore the effectiveness of aligning the program sessions with faculty self-assessments on competencies. Fellows generally self-rated close to "competent" on the Milestones, leading sessions to emphasize progression towards Proficient. Alignment between sessions and competency development, and the accuracy of the self-assessments continue to be explored.