Teaching to Teach: An Effective and Feasible Teaching Curriculum for Internal Medicine Interns

OBJECTIVES: New competency requirements from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education have prompted greater emphasis on developing residents' teaching skills. Many residents make their first foray into teaching during internship, making it an important yet underrecognized opportunity to develop basic teaching skills. In addition, in the current graduate medical education climate, residents' tasks are compressed into an even shorter time, which has caused teaching opportunities and expectations to be balanced with the need for efficiency. After performing needs assessment surveys of medicine interns and medical students, we developed an interns-as-teachers curriculum to equip internal medicine interns with skills specific to their unique role as medical student teachers. METHODS: We conducted a workshop focused around four specific skills: role modeling, using teachable moments (ie, teaching on the fly), thinking out loud, and coaching. We evaluated the curriculum by comparing pre- and postcurricular teaching knowledge, attitudes, and self-reported teaching behaviors among 51 interns in the intervention group with 20 interns in the comparison group from the previous year's class. RESULTS: Sixty-one interns participated in the curriculum, and 51 (84%) completed both surveys. Knowledge and several self-reported teaching behaviors improved significantly among the intervention group, but not in the comparison group. CONCLUSIONS: Interns participating in a half-day interns-as-teachers workshop aimed at preparing them to teach medical students in clinical settings achieved significant improvement in teaching knowledge and in several core, self-reported teaching behaviors.