A National Web Site for Residents as Teachers

Objective: Medical students and resident physicians receive a substantial proportion of their teaching from senior residents. Yet many residents are not trained in clinical teaching skills. Little research even clarifies residents' specific needs for teaching skills development. The Residents' Teaching Skills Web Site Project, developed in conjunction with the Graduate Medical Education Section of the AAMC's Group on Educational Affairs, provides free online teaching resources for resident physicians and teaching faculty in all specialties. Its purposes are to supplement the residents-as-teachers curricula offered at many academic medical centers while serving as a national research tool to gather data on how residents can best be helped to improve their skills in clinical teaching. Description: The beta version of the Residents' Teaching Skills Web Site, 〈www.residentteachers.com〉, features streaming videos on residents' teaching styles, asking the viewer questions about two different approaches to the same teaching case. The Web site also offers an extensive bibliography, numerous Web links, and guidelines for developing residents-as-teachers programs. In our initial Web-based research study, resident physicians across the country are being recruited to complete an online version of the Clinical Teaching Perception Inventory® (CTPI),1 a 28-item Q-sort instrument that measures their comfort with clinical teaching and suggests ways they can improve their teaching skills. In the CTPI, respondents rank key words that describe clinical teachers, comparing their own attributes as clinical teachers with those of an “ideal” teacher. The respondents can immediately view detailed, individualized explanations of their scores, accessing targeted links to related Web sites that provide further help with improving clinical teaching skills. The Web site records and codes all incoming data, permitting us to obtain a nationwide “snapshot” of residents' needs for teaching skills education in various training levels and specialties. Teaching faculty and medical students are also welcome to take the CTPI and use the rest of the Web site. Discussion: We believe that the Residents' Teaching Skills Web Site will serve as a useful tool to help residents and faculty enhance clinical teaching skills. Preliminary feedback about the Web site has been strongly positive. In addition, as we launched the site, we surveyed 2,057 residency programs and graduate medical education (GME) offices about any teaching skills training they offered their resident physicians. Of the 1,178 residency program directors and GME leaders who had responded as of fall 2000, 1,089 (92.4%) reported that they would consider using a Web-based program such as ours to enhance their residents' teaching skills. We anticipate that the various components of our Web site and its online research will inform the development of innovative curricula tailored to residents' specific learning needs for becoming better and more confident teachers. Future plans include a randomized, controlled, multicenter trial of a longitudinal residents-as-teachers curriculum. The Web site will support this curricular study (with capability of protecting selected materials by password) and function as a research database for future collaborative educational studies.