Build It and They Shall Come: Medical Education Communities of Practice

Abstract

Background: Producing scholarship in education is essential to the career development of a clinician-educator. Challenges to scholarly production include a lack of resources, time, expertise, and collaborators.

Objective: To develop communities of practice for education scholarship through an international society to increase community and academic productivity.

Methods: We developed multi-institutional scholarship pods within the American Thoracic Society through the creation of a working group (2017-2019). Pods met virtually, and meetings were goal focused to advance education scholarship within their area of interest. To understand the impact of these scholarship pods, we surveyed pod leaders and members in 2021 and analyzed the academic productivity of each pod via a survey of pod leaders and a review of the PubMed index.

Results: Nine pods were created, each with an assigned educational topic. The survey had a response rate of 76.6%. The perceived benefits were the opportunity to meet colleagues with similar interests at other institutions, production of scholarly work, and engagement in new experiences. The main challenges were difficulty finding times to meet because of competing clinical demands and aligning times among pod members. Regarding academic productivity, eight publications, four conference presentations, and one webinar/podcast were produced by six of the nine pods.

Conclusion: The development of communities of practice resulted in increased multi-site collaboration, with boosted academic productivity as well as an enhanced sense of belonging. Multiple challenges remain but can likely be overcome with accountability, early discussion of roles and expectations, and clear delegation of tasks and authorship.

Keywords: collaboration; communities of practice; education scholarship; medical education; multi-institutional.

Figure 1.

Scholarship pod membership. For the Education Research working group, there were a total of nine scholarship pods. Each individual pod is shown above, with graphical representation of where members were located within the United States. There was one international member (denoted by the star).

Figure 2.

Scholarship pod academic productivity. Each individual pod was encouraged to produce educational scholarship, including manuscripts (blue), conference presentations (orange), and webinars/podcasts (gray).