Reflecting on medical education predictions for 2025: part 3

This is my third and final post reflecting back on predictions made for what the role of a medical educator would look like in 2025 in the editorial titled “Job Roles of the Medical Educator in 2025” (Simpson, Marcdante, et al 2018). As a reminder, the editorial lists the six roles required of medical educators by 2025 as follows:

·      Diagnostic Assessor

·      Content Curator

·      Technology Adopter

·      Learner-Centered Navigator and Professional Coach

·      Clinician Role Model

·      Learning Environment Designer, Engineer, Architect, and Implementer

This blog post will focus on the fifth and sixth roles: Clinician Role Model and Learning Environment Designer, Engineer, Architect, and Implementer.

“Clinician Role Model: Exemplar for the various 2025 physician job roles

Learning Environment Designer, Engineer, Architect, and Implementer: Designs the ‘space’ to optimize learning informed by the sciences (eg, learning)” (244).

The Clinician Role Model is meant to teach by example how to be a physician, providing excellent care for patients and being a strong member of an interdisciplinary team. The Learning Environment Designer, Engineer, Architect, and Implementer is meant to design the learning “space” (virtual, face-to-face, hybrid, or a combination) for students, utilizing principles of the science of how people learn to do so.

I see the Clinician Role Model role as being a role that hopefully has existed throughout the history of medical education. What I see as having changed over time are the expectations of what physician-educators are role modeling. The competencies that are expected of physicians today include communication, professionalism (a tricky and vague term that I’ll explore in future blog posts), being a member and/or leader of interdisciplinary teams, systems thinking, and self-awareness. While the idea of physician-educators being role models to their students is not a new one, I appreciate the authors calling it out as a role that continues to be important, as well as indicating the shift in the qualities that physician-educators are expected to role model.

The Learning Environment Designer, Engineer, Architect, and Implementer is another mouthful of a title, but the educational psychology/health professions education nerd in me is thrilled that the authors included this role. I know that not all medical school faculty have studied education as an academic discipline, so it seems helpful to have included this role in the list to highlight what knowledge and competencies are important for designing a learning environment. Ideally, physician-educators who embrace this role will combine their expertise in medicine with knowledge of education principles and educational technology to create learning experiences that resonate with their students.

As I look at all six of the job roles, they seem to indeed be facets of the job of the medical educator in 2025. The challenge in implementing all six roles is energy, time, and money. Not all medical schools have the resources to ensure that faculty are trained in educational principles or have access to the latest technology to utilize in their lessons. As well, there are additional considerations for medical educators in 2025 that the editorial authors didn’t predict, such as dealing with post-COVID learners and navigating uncertainty around what medicine can legally be practiced in which parts of the country.

In the editorial, the authors quoted Catherine Lucey from her keynote address at the 2017 meeting of the Association for Medical Education in Europe (AMEE) and noted that “we share Lucey’s vision that educators’ value will lie in their ‘wisdom, structured approach to a problem, ability to model ongoing learning, and in their ability to create an environment where every learner is valued and supported to achieve their best’” (245). I think these qualities of wisdom, problem-solving skills, modeling continuous learning, and communicating caring to students are important to highlight, as they transcend current trends and technology. Hopefully, ways of supporting and sustaining medical educators will be identified and prioritized at medical schools, so that they are able to exhibit these qualities with their students and fulfill the roles imagined by the authors.

Source: Simpson, D., Marcdante, K., Souza, K.H., Anderson, A., & Holmboe, E. (2018, June 1). Job Roles of the 2025 Medical Educator. Journal of Graduate Medical Education, 10(3): 243–246. https://doi.org/10.4300/JGME-D-18-00253.1