MedTalks: developing teaching abilities and experience in undergraduate medical students

ABSTRACT

Objectives: According to the CanMEDS’ Scholar competency, physicians are expected to facilitate the learning of colleagues, patients and other health professionals. However, most medical students are not provided with formal opportunities to gain teaching experience with objective feedback.

Methods: To address this, the University’s Medical Education Interest Group (MEIG) created a pilot teaching program in January 2015 entitled ‘MedTalks’. Four 3-hour sessions were held at the University Faculty of Medicine, where first and second year medical students taught clinically oriented topics to undergraduate university students. Each extracurricular session included three 30-minute content lectures, and a 90-minute small group session on physical examination skills. Each medical student-teacher received formal feedback from undergraduate students and from faculty educators regarding teaching style, communication abilities, and professionalism. In addition, medical student-teachers self-evaluated their own teaching experience.

Results: Over 50 medical students from the University participated as medical student-teachers. Based on quantitative and qualitative evaluation surveys, 100% of medical students agreed that MedTalks was a useful way to develop teaching skills and 92% gained a greater confidence in individual teaching capabilities, based largely on the opportunity to gain experience (with feedback) in teaching roles.

Conclusions: A program designed to give medical students multi-source teaching experience (lecture- and small group-based) and feedback on their teaching (from learners and Faculty observers, in addition to their own self-reflection) can improve medical student confidence and enthusiasm towards teaching. Future studies will clarify if medical student self-perceived enhancements in teaching ability can be corroborated by independent (Faculty, learner) observations of future teaching activity.

KEYWORDS:

• Medical student
• teaching program
• teaching skills
• teaching experience
• feedback
• scholar
• CanMEDs
• students-as-teachers (SAT)

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the following individuals of the University of Ottawa Medical Education Interest Group (Stephen Burke, Agnes Crnic, Alexandra Hamelin, Pushpinder Kanda, Vinny Khullar, Laura Zuccaro) for their contributions in the organization of MedTalks.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Suhair Bandeali

Suhair Bandeali is a medical student at the University of Ottawa (MD2017) who co-founded the MedTalks initiative.

Albert Chiang

Albert Chiang is a medical student at the University of Ottawa (MD2017) who co-founded the MedTalks initiative.

Christopher J. Ramnanan

Christopher J. Ramnanan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Innovation in Medical Education. His scholarly interests includes optimizing anatomy education and teaching and research opportunities for medical students.