A Self-Evaluation of Residents-as-Teachers Following a Medical Education Technology Training Session

Competency Based Medical Education (CBME) encourages medical students to become lifelong learners. For acquiring skills at various levels, the current pedagogical approach needs to be replaced with hands-on sessions. An increased number of faculty members are required to engage the large batches for such teaching methods. The residents are the source of one-third of practical knowledge for undergraduate students even now. This hidden curriculum by the residents could be used to reinforce the class-room teaching till such time as the faculty strength can be increased.

(1) To report the current status of post-graduate residents with regard to their expectations in their roles as teachers to the undergraduates. (2) To study the effect of a medical education technology training programme on their approach to teaching.

It was done as an interventional study of medical education training done by the Medical Education Unit of our institute. The residents were called for one day orientation to teaching learning methods. There were pre-evaluations before every session about their attitude and practice of the art of teaching. A post-test was added to the session and evaluation was done after at least a month for the first-year batch in a prospective fashion, after one year for the immediate senior batch in an ambispective fashion and a similar assessment for their senior batch.

In spite of attending the orientation sessions, 22 out of 57 (38.6%) residents were anxious about taking classes. More residents were involved in bedside teaching and lectures on follow-up compared to the initial survey. The correlation between the various teaching attributes before the training became stronger post training.

Improvements were noted in time management, rapport etcetera while there were no changes in many other aspects of teaching including planning.