Letter from the Editor—Announcing the Ninth Annual Editors’ Choice Award

Revisiting Teaching and Learning in Medicine’s research publications in Volume 34 (2022), the reader will find study topics ranging from well-being and resilience to faculty development, clinical skills training, and peer-assisted learning. Topics such as these have remained at the forefront of educators’ minds since medical education first emerged as a field. What feels new about current work is growing interest in approaching it from an equity standpoint with the aim of making education accessible and rewarding for all. Along these lines, several studies published in TLM this volume year explore the role of identity in teaching and learning and examine the adequacy of medical education to meet the needs of diverse patient populations.

It is from among these publications that I selected the following candidates for this year’s Editors’ Choice Award:

• Indigenous Mentorship in the Health Sciences: Actions and Approaches of Mentors

  Adam Thomas Murry, Cheryl Barnabe, Sharon Foster, Aisha S. Taylor, Elaine Atay, Rita Henderson, and Lindsay Crowshoe (Canada & United States)

• Teaching the Teacher: Assessing Barriers to Identity Formation of Clinical Teachers in a Developing Country

  Romesa Q. Khana, Hashim T. Khanb and Mobeen Iqbal (Pakistan)

• “I Find It Quite A Privilege To Be Involved In Their Lives”: A Multinational Qualitative Study of Program Directors’ Perspectives on their Relationships with Residents

  Debalina Dutta, Dora J. Stadler, Joseph Cofrancesco Jr, Sophia Archuletae, and Halah Ibrahim (New Zealand, United States, Qatar, Singapore, & United Arab Emirates)

• Supporting Self-Directed Learning: Development of Faculty Evaluation Scale

  Youn Seon Lim, Virginia T. Lyons, and Joanne M. Willey (United States)

• I am an Educator: Investigating Professional Identity Formation using Social Cognitive Career Theory

  Jessica N. Byram, Kyle A. Robertson, and Christen K. Dilly (United States)

This award, a recognition program now in its ninth cycle, highlights publications that exemplify TLM’s mission to “provide the theoretical foundations and practical analysis needed for effective educational decision making.” For medical educators seeking to fundamentally change their practice, publications of this nature are needed to empower understanding, growth, and action.

Seven TLM editorial board members evaluated the selected articles using the award’s selection criteria, which reflect TLM’s mission to feature innovative, practically inspired inquiry that advances scholarly conversation about teaching and learning and helps educators approach their practice in new ways. These criteria are:

• Impact on Theory – The perceived degree to which the article helps build explanations, illuminate the role of context, and/or promote the asking of new questions. Outstanding articles according to this criterion go beyond providing new knowledge to promote new understanding.

• Impact on Practice – The perceived degree to which the article enables educators to design or implement something with confidence that it will work in their setting. Outstanding articles according to this criterion go beyond providing insight on how to do something to fuel capacity to educate.

• Innovativeness – Not all that is new is innovative. Outstanding articles according to this criterion push the boundary, going past incremental improvements or change to shifting paradigms and turning established ideas on their head.

• Accessibility – Not all findings that are impactful or innovative are accessible to a wide audience. Outstanding articles according to this criterion present the material in a way that clearly indicates their utility to educational decision making and their importance to theoretical understanding.

The selection panelists who thoughtfully reviewed this year’s candidates were:

• Anabelle Andon, PhD, Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons

• Heeyoung Han, PhD, Southern Illinois University School of Medicine

• Abigail Konopasky, PhD, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College

• Anneke Metz, PhD, Southern Illinois University School of Medicine

• Louis Pangaro, MD, MACP, Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences

• Subha Ramani, MBBS, PhD, Harvard Medical School

• Saniya Sabzwari, MBBS, Aga Khan University

Panelists independently rated each candidate article on the selection criteria using a scale of one to five, providing brief remarks justifying their ratings. Candidates were ranked within panelist based on the sum of their four criterion ratings, and then ranks were averaged across panelists. The best-ranking article was selected to receive the Editors’ Choice Award: recognition and a prize of no less than $500 or no less than $100 per author awarded by The Terrill A. Mast TLM Foundation.

Based on the panel’s ratings, this year’s selection was:

• Indigenous Mentorship in the Health Sciences: Actions and Approaches of Mentors

  Adam Thomas Murry, Cheryl Barnabe, Sharon Foster, Aisha S. Taylor, Elaine Atay, Rita Henderson, and Lindsay Crowshoe (Canada & United States)

In this study, Murry et al. aimed to identify the behaviors associated with Indigenous mentoring relationships involving health sciences students. To augment a list of 29 Indigenous mentoring behaviors they identified via literature review, Murry et al. used Flanagan’s critical incident technique to gather an additional 46 Indigenous mentoring behaviors from ∼24 Indigenous mentors participating in the Alberta Indigenous Mentorship in Health Innovation network retreat in March 2018. Murry et al. then used two rounds of Lincoln and Guba’s cut-and-sort technique to identify empirically the behaviors uniquely associated with Indigenous mentoring. Their analysis compared the 75 Indigenous mentoring behaviors they identified to 93 non-Indigenous mentoring behaviors they derived from literature review. Murry et al. ultimately developed seven categories of 66 Indigenous mentoring behaviors: Utilize Mentee-Centered Focus, Encourage Self-Advocacy, Imbue Criticality, Abide by Indigenous Ethics, Practice Relationalism, Foster Indigenous Identity Development, and Advocate for the Mentee. Murry et al. advocate for the use of their novel theoretical model by all mentors of Indigenous health sciences students, while also recognizing the need for further validation of the model’s structure and applicability to diverse Indigenous populations.

The selection panelists called this study’s theoretical development a “conversation starter” in “an under-researched area,” grounded in rich understanding of Indigenous mentors’ lived experience:

Indigenous modes of thinking are imbued throughout the article… In places where there were gaps in the literature, the authors ingeniously employed the counsel of experts.

The panelists observed that “creating an environment where Indigenous team members can thrive is absolutely critical” but also that, more generally,

The topic of mentoring is important, [yet] institutions and individuals often define it inaccurately. One size does not fit all. This emphasizes the need for culture to be an integral part of mentoring relationships. Mentors and mentees can come from different societal cultures and be respectful and curious and learn from each other. However, this entails cultural intelligence and sensitivity.

In proposing “a novel model for shaping Indigenous mentoring” via “thorough analysis of a local, specific setting,” the panelists highlighted this study’s potential for “model building and advancing understanding of mentorship across less well represented contexts” and achieving “huge impact on [mentor] practice.” The panelists found the article’s “focus on what mentors do [to be] a great strength” and that the study’s “methodology is well explained and easy to track for someone less familiar with qualitative methods” and “incredibly accessible and readable by anyone, whether they have research training or not.”

The panelists also observed that this study produced a rich description of a “distinct population,” yet because of its conceptual development, it could “be a forerunner of other mentoring studies that incorporate culture” and may “generalize to multicultural multiethnic trainees across programs” by “creating an expanded worldview for how one might approach mentorship.” Indeed, as one panelist put it:

This paper reminds us of the need for continuous theory-building of medical education in non-Western settings.

Murry et al.’s article is a beautifully and thoughtfully written account of an in-depth, scholarly investigation that has important practical implications, exemplifying the research we aim to publish at TLM. In addition, it demonstrates the value of high-quality scholarship to dismantling structural inequities in health sciences education through advanced understanding and improved capacity to act constructively. Please join me in enthusiastically congratulating these authors for their important work.

I welcome you to examine this article more closely and to review all of the above-listed 2023 Editors’ Choice Award candidates. Our publisher, Taylor & Francis, has released these articles for free access through the end of the year. For easy reference, you may find them all in the Collection titled “2023 Editors’ Choice.”

Anna T. Cianciolo, PhD
Editor-In-Chief
[email protected]

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.