Teaching psychiatric residents to teach

Teaching other residents and medical students is one of the primary activities of psychiatric residents, yet most receive minimal or no formal training or supervision on how to teach. This report describes a Teaching Day Workshop, designed and implemented by residents at the Massachusetts General Hospital with the support of their faculty and an educational consultant, as one model to introduce the concepts and techniques of teaching to psychiatric residents. The participating residents were unanimous in their positive appraisal of the workshop, and they recommended that additional seminars on teaching be integrated into the residency's core curriculum. Ways that the Teaching Day Workshop can be adapted for use by other residency training programs are discussed. The authors believe that teaching residents to be better teachers can have an impact on recruitment of medical students into psychiatry and psychiatric residents into careers in academic psychiatry.