The Education Portfolio: Reflecting on the Past to Move Forward

As I entered my final year of training and saw dozens of colleagues go through a professional development plateau, I wanted to be proactive in approaching my transition to a faculty role. That’s where my Educator’s Portfolio (EP) (compared to a traditional curriculum vitae (CV) in an Academic Medicine Last Page I coauthored) came into play. Having used my CV as the starting point for my early EP draft, I initially perceived the EP to be documentation of my past successes in education. However, the EP challenged me to seriously reflect on achievements in a more critical way, in how these could be interwoven to make a compelling narrative and give me a clearer path forward. Many find the Educational Philosophy section of the EP one of the most difficult to write. I imagine this may be in part because so often in medicine we are christened as teachers the day we complete clinical training—despite the lack of teacher training. However, being forced to put my approach to fostering learning into words helped me discover both how I could better serve my learners and enhance my own development far more than nearly any other exercises I could have imagined. Telling the stories of past teaching and learning enabled my mindful reflection, giving me clarity of purpose that can be challenging to find at the start of an academic career. This clarity nurtured more concrete goals than I likely would have been able to articulate on my own. In part, early faculty can be set back by...
Source: Academic Medicine Blog - Category: Universities & Medical Training Authors: Tags: Featured Guest Perspective graduate medical education professional development Source Type: blogs