Dynamic Opportunities for Medical Students to Assume the Roles of "Medical Teacher"

Abstract

The traditional undergraduate medical education curriculum focuses on bolstering knowledge for practice and building clinical skills. However, as future clinicians, medical students will be tasked with teaching throughout their careers, first as residents and then as attendings. Here, we describe teaching opportunities for students that foster their development as future teachers and potential clinician educators. These offerings are diverse in their focus and duration and are offered across various levels of the curriculum - including course-based learning, longitudinal electives, and extra-curricular opportunities for medical students who have a passion for teaching.

Keywords: Elective; Student-teachers; Teaching; Undergraduate medical education.

Fig. 1

Timeline highlighting teaching opportunities for students in the UCCoM undergraduate medical education curriculum. Course years (M1 through M4) are indicated across the top and shaded for the length of the different foundational courses in that all students take simultaneously during M1/M2 years. Clerkship experiences (M3) and post-clerkship learning (M4) are different for each learner. During the curriculum, individual opportunities for students to become teachers are represented as dot longitudinal experiences are represented as lines (from when the student first joins the teaching experience until the experience concludes)

Fig. 2

Multiple teaching experiences provide opportunities to practice various roles of a medical teacher. The UCCoM teaching offerings (listed on the left) are detailed by the type of teaching taking place, the class year for the student–learner and student–teacher, and the teacher role for the student–teacher role and faculty [8]