SUPPORTING THE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF FACULTY TEACHERS

I and my colleagues designed and implemented a longitudinal faculty development program to improve humanistic teaching and role modeling at 30 medical schools involving more than 1,000 faculty members and 50 local facilitators. Evaluation demonstrated that participating faculty members who completed our program were superior humanistic teachers compared to controls as rated by their learners on a validated questionnaire. Participants were also sufficiently engaged to attend 80% or more of the curricular sessions with few dropouts, indicating the feasibility and generalizability of the program. Preliminary analysis of participants' personal narratives at the beginning compared to the end of our program suggested advancement in professional identity formation. I provide examples of the narratives and discuss future studies addressing this topic.