Documenting the Trajectory of Your Teaching

Abstract

Being a teacher in a medical school is a challenge. It’s a delightful, rewarding, surprising, engaging, inspiring honor of a challenge, but a challenge nonetheless. Whether you give lectures to large groups, facilitate small groups, guide teams in Team-Based Learning, or teach in clinical rounds, you are likely to find that as you try things out, you learn more and more about what does and does not work. The changes you make, for better or worse, plot the trajectory of your teaching – the ascent of a successful lecture, the descent of a difficult tutor group, the subsequent correction in style or approach that demonstrates your reflection on feedback or evaluation. Chapter 13 encourages you to be deliberate and evidence-based in your approach to improving your teaching. In this chapter, we will encourage you to document the trajectory of your teaching, and will discuss mechanisms for gathering information about your teaching from various sources.