What Drives Clinicians to Teach While Caring for Patients?

Past medical education scholarship has explored what to teach, how to teach it better, and the evaluation of what these efforts provide learners. Missing from this dialogue has been the question of what clinician-educators gain from teaching. In this Invited Commentary on Frija-Gruman and colleagues' article "Learning Through Teaching: How Physicians Learn Medicine in Authentic Clinical Contexts," the authors go beyond how and what clinician-educators learn through teaching to what drives clinicians to teach while caring for patients. Using a conceptual framework put forth by Daniel Pink built around the intrinsic domains of autonomy, mastery, and purpose, the authors posit that there are deep-seated psychological motivational principles underpinning the passion for teaching. The authors explore how teaching within patient care uniquely fosters and enhances autonomy (choice over what to do and how), mastery (the pursuit of betterment), and purpose (doing something that feels deeply meaningful and important), and in doing so, they present their rationale for how teaching gives back more to the teacher than is typically recognized. The authors then discuss the obstacles to the realization of teaching's full potential and conclude with a call for recognizing the intrinsic motivators as a key element for clinician-educators and clinical education to thrive.