An Interactive Workshop to Enhance Teaching Skills Through Understanding Teaching Styles

Teaching is an essential physician competency, yet education on how to teach is limited in medical training and often emphasizes specific skills over basic approaches. We developed a workshop to help educators understand their inherent teaching styles and explore strategies from other styles using the framework developed by Grasha and Riechmann.

To maximize participant engagement, we used clips from the Harry Potter films where characters exemplify the different teaching styles. We described the strengths and weaknesses of each style and reviewed the importance of matching teaching style to context and learners' needs. Participants then discussed various teaching scenarios in small groups to deepen their understanding of their default natural teaching style and to explore less-familiar teaching styles. We evaluated the workshop using surveys with Likert scales and narrative feedback. All authors collaborated on inductive thematic analysis of written comments.

We delivered this workshop at seven regional, national, and international conferences. Of 170 respondents, 99% reported understanding their natural teaching style better, and 91% indicated they would likely change their teaching approach after participating. We identified three themes in participants' feedback: making conscious choices about teaching styles, the value of a flexible approach that incorporates elements from the full range of teaching styles, and the importance of matching teaching style to learners' specific needs and the educational context.

This workshop complements existing materials on specific teaching skills by providing a foundational understanding of teaching styles. Using excerpts from popular movies makes the workshop both entertaining and memorable.