Proctoring as advanced surgical learning: the proctor's perspective in robotic surgery

Robotic proctoring is often considered a safety and training mechanism for surgeons adopting robotic platforms. While the benefits of proctoring for adopting surgeons have been described across specialties, the educational impact of proctoring on the proctor remains largely unexplored. This Perspective examines robotic proctoring from the proctor's vantage point and argues that proctoring represents a unique professional privilege and a powerful form of advanced surgical learning, offering rare access to the collective experience of surgeons and the accumulated influence of their mentors, institutions, and training traditions. Proctoring enables deliberate observation of diverse operative styles, intraoperative judgment, and system-level factors across institutions, facilitating comparative learning that is difficult to reproduce through personal operative experience alone. Educational theory supports this observation: the protégé effect demonstrates that teaching enhances the teacher's own learning, and the surgical coaching literature increasingly recognizes the bidirectional nature of structured peer-level educational exchange. This Perspective contrasts the largely informal evolution of laparoscopy with the structured implementation of robotics and discusses how centralized training ecosystems and mandated proctoring created an unprecedented opportunity for bidirectional educational exchange. Finally, implications for surgical education, credentialing, and faculty development are outlined, including the practical importance of institutional support, professional flexibility, and fair compensation to sustain proctoring as an enduring source of professional growth.