Documenting Teaching Activities
Preamble
The Department of Medicine (DoM) within the Temerty Faculty of Medicine (TFOM) is deeply committed to its role as educator and teacher. All DoM faculty members are expected to contribute to fulfilling our education mandate through their interactions with learners at the undergraduate, MD, postgraduate, fellowship, and/or graduate training levels. Thus, it is essential that we ensure that those interacting with learners are fully equipped to do so, understand the expectations of them, and have opportunities for professional development and further enhancement of their teaching skills throughout their academic careers.
Clinical teaching is, fundamentally, about forming strong, trusted relationships and communications between teacher and learner. All faculty members are expected to be receptive to feedback on their teaching and engage in faculty development and/or mentorship around teaching/education as required.
Professionalism is also a core value in healthcare education. Faculty members are expected to behave in accordance with relevant policies on professionalism, including the standards of behaviour for medical clinical faculty and relations with industry. All relevant policies are found here.
Purpose
- Teaching/education expectations primarily serve to provide DoM faculty members and departmental divisions with explicit guidelines regarding the scope and breadth of formal teaching activities, as well as the quality of teaching expected, mainly for the purposes of recruitment, annual review and Continuing Faculty Appointment Review. Review our policy on Optimizing Teaching Effectiveness and the Learner Experience.
- While some academic departments and divisions may choose to use the teaching expectation guidelines as the basis for determining merit awards based on teaching, it is recognized that individual hospital practice plans may have specific criteria that are not universally applicable.
- DoM faculty members seeking senior promotion to the rank of associate or full professor on the basis of teaching/education should refer to the criteria set by the University of Toronto specific to Sustained Excellence in Teaching.
Teaching Scope and Intensity by Academic Position Description
- The overall scope, intensity and type of teaching activities will depend on the academic position description.
- While DoM faculty members will be asked to quantify their teaching by listing discrete teaching activities (e.g., ASCM, academic half-day seminars) and absolute numbers of teaching hours, these counts provide only one measure of an individual’s teaching intensity and complexity and should not be the only metric used.
- Challenges arise when trying to equate teaching time across different types of teaching and educational activities. Efforts should be made to consider preparation time, contact time and number of learners impacted. Global assessments of an individual’s teaching intensity will also take into account factors such as innovation and creative input provided and geographic scope
Documenting Teaching Activities
All DoM faculty members must maintain a formal record of their teaching/education activities using the Teaching and Education Report (TER) in WebCV:
| Teaching Level | Hospital | University Departmental | External-Departmental | National/International |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Multi-level education | Grand rounds, morning report | City-wide divisional rounds | City-wide surgical grand rounds | Invited grand rounds speaker for another University |
| Undergraduate education | Summer research student supervision | Lecture for an undergraduate medical sciences course | Lecture or workshop for other faculty’s students | Invited presenter for an external organization or institution |
| Graduate education | Supervising a hospital-based practicum for a graduate student | Lecture for the DoM clinician-scientist program | Graduate course through IHPME, OISE etc. | Lectures or workshops for other institutions |
| Undergraduate medical education | Informal teaching on the clinical teaching unit, ASCM, PBL, DOCH, portfolio | Internal medicine clerkship seminars | TTC, TTR, pre-clerkship lectures (e.g., MMMD) | Teaching at other university’s medical schools |
| Postgraduate medical education | Informal teaching in the ambulatory clinic, noon rounds | Academic half-day seminars | Academic half-day for non-medical training program (e.g., surgery, family medicine) | Examiner for the Royal College Training Examinations |
| Faculty development | Teaching consultation for divisional members | Workshop for the Master Teacher Program | Workshop organized through CFD | Workshop presented at a national medical education conference (e.g., CCME) |
| Continuing medical education* | Hospital grand rounds | City-wide divisional rounds | City-wide surgical grand rounds | Plenary at a medical society annual meeting (e.g., Canadian Society of Internal Medicine) |
| Interprofessional education | Morbidity and mortality rounds | Lectures during “Pain Week” or other IP events | Teaching at U of T certificate course in Patient Safety | National/international CE events |
| Patient and public education | Hospital-based patient education days | Division based patient education days or events | Teaching at mini-med school | Developing patient educational materials for national organizations/societies |
| Research supervision | Resident research project | Resident research project supervision | Graduate student (e.g., MSc, MEd, PhD) supervision | Participating in national research courses |
| Mentorship | Mentorship of undergraduate and graduate students, residents, other faculty, etc. based at your site. | Mentorship of undergraduate and graduate students, residents, other faculty, etc. | Mentorship of undergraduate and graduate students, residents, other faculty, etc. | Mentorship of undergraduate and graduate students, residents, other faculty, etc. |
*Note that most industry-sponsored teaching activities do not qualify as academic teaching activities