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Abstract
Background: As future physicians, questions about when medical students realize they will have to teach remain under-explored.
Aim: To understand when students serving in pre-clinical teaching roles make the connection between teaching and being a physician.
Methods: Medical students involved in a peer instruction program included: (1) archived first-year student interview candidate data (n = 60/150); (2) focus groups of first-year students selected as instructors (n = 16/60); and (3) focus groups of second-year students (n = 16/24) who taught for the program. A modified extended-term mixed-method research design involved data from the pre-hire interviews and post-hire focus group.
Results: Prior to teaching, none of the first year interviewees made an explicit connection between teaching and being a physician. The new instructors selected to teach minimally made a connection and only after prompting. The majority of the experienced instructors did make the connection; however, and did so spontaneously.
Conclusion: It was only after they taught medicine-related material that students saw the benefits of teaching as a way of preparing for becoming a physician and not merely as a way to review or help their peers.
Notes
1. The focus groups of the second-year students were conducted by the faculty member (MG) as the other investigator (JA) was the student coordinator for SSN during the school year; therefore the second year instructors were both JA's peers and teaching for SSN under her guidance. JA did conduct the focus groups for the incoming first year instructors, however, as these students were not her classmates and she had had little to no interaction with them previously.