The Teaching Skills Curriculum in the Internal Medicine Residency Program recognizes the importance of training residents how to teach, since nearly one-fifth of their time is spent engaged in mentoring or teaching activities. Formal guided opportunities now exist at Iowa for residents to refine their abilities, especially for those interested in becoming physician educators.
Designed by Dr. Manish Suneja, Residency Director, and Jane Rowat, Educational Development Director, the curriculum is a three-year rolling plan, ensuring residents get exposure to all components by the time they complete the program.
One component, reserved for third-year residents, is the Teaching Resident Rotation, a four-week rotation during which participants facilitate small-group learning sessions, develop an educational project, and regularly provide individual learners with feedback and evaluation of their progress. Teaching Residents deliver lectures that are responsive to recent encounters and to learner needs and interests, an essential pedagogical skill for an academic physician.
Dr. Carolyn Hilliard, rising Chief Resident for the 2018-19 academic year, had the following to say about her recent experience on the rotation:
“I loved the teaching rotation, I have always seen myself in academic medicine and I really enjoy working with medical students. The rotation was an awesome learning experience for me because I am much more used to hands on, 1-minute clinical pearls teaching at bedside or right after I see a patient with a medical student, so to create a didactic lecture that was engaging and blended patients I knew into the topics was definitely a fun challenge. It also allowed me to work on question-writing for tests, which is something I’ve found fun since a few exposures in medical school and hope to someday do more of.”
[…] Under the leadership of Dr. Manish Suneja, Residency Director, and Jane Rowat, Educational Development Director, our residents have access to an innovative and flexible curriculum. Their time at Iowa grounds them in the fundamentals in many outstanding educational venues in general medicine and our subspecialties. I am pleased to see that the current chief residents have re-instituted Morning Reports as a venue to discuss the management and diagnostic challenges of recently admitted patients. This makes me nostalgic as I recall my morning reports of yesteryear. Another important opportunity that both contributes to our mission to support medical student education and hones the skills of our trainees as educators is the teaching resident rotation. This rotation reflects our institutional strength in generating future leaders in medical education, and the feedback that I have received thus far is that the experience has been very positive both for the teaching resident as well as the learners with whom they interact. One of our residents who recently completed her teaching resident rotation reflects on the experienc… […]