Teaching and learning psychiatry

This article reviews the teaching-learning process in psychiatry. It describes eight attributes of a successful teacher, suggests ways that psychiatrists may improve their teaching skills, and delineates four stages (exposure, incorporation, integration, and mastery) of the learning process that have implications for how and what we teach. Methods to evaluate teaching rigorously so that it can be academically rewarded are described. At a time when the place of the psychiatric teacher in the academic medical center is precarious and often discouraging, the author discusses sources of support from students, fellow faculty, and national colleagues that can help sustain teaching in, and teachers of, psychiatry.