Use of student feedback to drive quality improvement (QI) in a preclinical U.S. medical school course.

Medical educators are continually looking for ways to enhance integrated learning and help students see how the material taught in their various courses is inter-related. . At Stony Brook School of Medicine, we embarked on a school-wide new curriculum called the Learning focused, Experiential, Adaptive, Rigorous and Novel (LEARN) curriculum and developed several integrated courses that were not based in specific departments. As part of this process, the pre-clinical (Phase-1) curriculum was shortened to 17 months to accommodate an expanded set of clinical offerings. The new structure called for teachers from different departments to lead and conduct the integrated blocks of pre-clinical courses. In this paper, we describe our discouraging experience with the first iteration of an integrated course in Cardiology, Pulmonology and Renal organ systems (CPR), and its transformation into a highly successful second iteration. This involved a systematic course quality improvement (QI) process within the context of a larger school wide curricular reform. As a result, student overall satisfaction with the course increased from 22% (28 of 127 responders) to 83% (111 of 134 responders); the mean score on a standardized NBME content exam increased by 6.7%. We report the systematic process we used to collect data from students and faculty that helped facilitate quality improvement in a key course in Phase-1 of our LEARN curriculum.

How Mentor Identity Evolves: Findings From a 10-Year Follow-up Study of a National Professional Development Program.

PURPOSE: Despite academic medicine's endorsement of professional development and mentoring, little is known about what junior faculty learn about mentoring in implicit curricula of professional development programs, and how their mentor identity evolves in this context. The authors explored what faculty-participants in the Educational Scholars Program implicitly learned about mentoring and how the implicit curriculum affected mentor identity transformation. METHOD: Semistructured interviews with 19 of 36 former faculty-participants were conducted in 2016. Consistent with constructivist grounded theory, data collection and analysis overlapped. The authors created initial codes informed by Ibarra's model for identity transformation, iteratively revised codes based on incoming data patterns, and created visual representations of relationships amongst codes to gain a holistic, shared understanding of the data. RESULTS: In the implicit curriculum, faculty-participants learned the importance of having multiple mentors, the value of peer mentors, and the incremental process of becoming a mentor. The authors used Ibarra's model to understand how the implicit curriculum worked to transform mentor identity: Faculty-participants reported observing mentors, experimenting with different ways to mentor and to be a mentor, and evaluating themselves as mentors. CONCLUSIONS: The Educational Scholars Program's implicit curriculum facilitated faculty-participants taking on mentor identity via opportunities it afforded to watch mentors, experiment with mentoring, and evaluate self as mentor, key ingredients for identity construction. Leaders of professional development programs can develop faculty as mentors by capitalizing on what faculty-participants learn in the implicit curriculum and deliberately structuring postgraduation mentoring opportunities.