Residents as Teachers

Residents are entrusted with extensive teaching duties in medical schools across the country, and the educational experience of medical students during clinical training is greatly shaped by resident-teachers. We know this to be true in relation to our own learning as students and our observations in our current academic roles. We also know this to be true on the basis of the findings of the AAMC Graduate Questionnaire documenting that residents are important teachers, yet may also belittle, diminish, or unfairly treat their medical students (1). In addition to this critical role, residents are often responsible for teaching junior residents and interns. Chief residents in many programs are handed this responsibility along with their administrative duties. Residents are also in positions of teaching a wide range of others, including members of the multidisciplinary team, residents in other specialties during Consultation Rotations, family members of patients in the context of care, and, finally, teaching in community settings, including mental health awareness programs and school- or forensic-based educational programs.

Capable, and, especially, gifted teachers possess specific skills and also have a capacity for understanding their formative influence upon others. Few residents will come to postgraduate training with well-developed teaching skills or the sense of their salience in student education. Few residents (as well as few faculty) are informed about principles of adult education and its theory or practice. Moreover, residents are busy--very busy! --mastering the many clinically-based competencies that constitute their field of medicine. For these reasons, intentional efforts to enhance the strengths of residents as teachers are, in our view, not only valuable, but necessary.

Assessing the extent to which psychiatry programs across the nation teach their residents to teach is the aim of the article by Crisp-Han et al. published in this issue of Academic Psychiatry (2). In recent years our journal has featured many articles offering guidance and perspectives on the role of resident-teachers (3-17), although this survey is the first to assess what psychiatric residency training programs are actually doing in this regard. Remarkably, formal curricular attention to help residents acquire and strengthen teaching skills was reported by 73% of the program directors who participated in the study, and 79% viewed this effort as "very important."

Although these high percentages suggested relative...