Establishing a Sustainable Teaching Academy by Embedding an Educational Research Fellowship into a Community of...

Teaching faculty is vital to the success of academic institutions. Academic biomedical faculty has faced greater workloads, and limited access to development opportunities. The Academy of Educational Scholars (AES) was designed as a community of practice with an embedded educational research fellowship to address the challenges of building and sustaining educational scholarship as recognized value for academic biomedical faculty careers.

An educational project-based, one-year faculty fellowship served to identify faculty motivated to join a community of practice. Fellowship curriculum development was guided by a literature review, internal needs' assessment, and the Kerns six-step framework. The program comprised ten 3-hour workshops and two project critique sessions delivered at monthly intervals over 12 months. Immediate session evaluations and a comprehensive program evaluation were conducted, assessing program value, and improvements in educator confidence in knowledge and skill. Outcome measures included presentations at local and national conferences, numbers of abstracts submitted, publications, grant submissions and new educational roles taken on.

Fellowship graduates from first 2 cohorts demonstrated a statistically significant improvement in knowledge about educational scholarship (p = 0.01) and related skills (p = 0.01). Program satisfaction was 93%. Content analysis revealed the most impactful program features were networking and joining a community focused on educational scholarship. AES fellow-produced scholarship includes 7 local/regional presentations, 10 abstracts, 6 publications, 4 grant submissions, 2 funded educational grants, and 4 new educational leadership roles. AES community activities include an annual retreat, monthly journal clubs, a teaching excellence recognition program, and a scholarship consult service.

Embedding an educational research fellowship into a community of practice is an effective model for building a sustainable teaching academy. Identifying local talent and incorporating member service expectations has minimized cost while incentivizing a volunteer model. Building the community of practice entailed intentional recruitment of mature educational scholars and novice fellows.