Building an effective programme for clinical teachers: the role of the staff developer

This paper arose from a workshop presented at the AMEE conference 'Horizon Scanning in Medical Education' held in Beer Sheva, Israel in August 2000. The aim of the workshop was to help participants, who all had a role in enhancing clinical teaching, to identify a range of strategies to meet the staff development needs of their client groups in terms of enhancing their teaching and educational supervision skills. The workshop started with some basic thoughts about how medical education has traditionally been carried our and why it is changing. It then moved through the thoughts of a selection of authors about what makes for a good learning environment, and introduced the 'tribes' that might be considered to have colonized the medical education terrain. These were stereotypically described as trailblazers, pioneers, settlers and nomads, with each group having specific characteristics that were outlined to the group. Workshop participants then engaged in an activity to consider how the characteristics of each group could best be harnessed in order to engage them in appropriate teaching and learning activity, and reported back their suggestions. This paper captures both the input into the workshop, and the ideas of participants about how it would be possible to capitalize on the existing skills and preferred working styles of their 'tribes' in enhancing medical education. The 24 participants, drawn from nine countries, found much in common in considering appropriate ways of working with clinical teachers. Their conclusions were that an educational staff developer needs to be able to use a variety of strategies and tactics, based on an understanding of the range of teachers in their 'territory' in order to capitalize on all their skills in enhancing the education of doctors in training.