Enhancing nutrition education through faculty development: from workshops to Web sites

Faculty resistance to changing medical school curricula is a major barrier to overcome in the effort to expand nutrition education. With clinical clerkships becoming more decentralized and basic science courses utilizing more small group teaching, the problem of reform is compounded by the increasing numbers of a more dispersed teaching faculty. A faculty development program was designed to complement a thematic approach to the inclusion of nutrition in a 4-y curriculum. The program offers workshops to help faculty learn how to teach in new settings while acquiring new knowledge about nutrition. Additionally, a themes Web site offers a window that faculty may use to review current nutrition content, to plan their teaching agendas, and to continually reassess where nutrition fits in the curriculum.