By Raynor Denitzio, CE News Reporter
On Tuesday, April 16, Gary Smith, PhD, Associate Dean of Continuous Professional Learning at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, presented a virtual journal club titled “Using the Clinician Educator Milestones to Generate Lifelong Learning.”
Released in 2022, the Clinician Education Milestone Project is a joint initiative of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME), the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), and the American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine (AACOM), with a goal “to provide faculty members with tools to help them with lifelong growth and development as educators.”
The milestones seek to address a common gap within medical education – although nearly every faculty member in an academic environment is expected to teach students, they often receive little to no formal training in the skills that make them effective educators.
“It’s [higher education] the only level of education where we don’t expect the teachers to know anything about how to teach,” said Dr. Smith. “We mostly select, at least our tenure track or leading faculty in health education, based on their expertise, at least in the medical school, as a clinician or researcher, or both. Yet at the same time, they’re also educators.”
The milestones are organized into a foundational domain for all educators (Universal Pillars for All Clinician Educators) and domains for various skills within the practice of clinical education – Administration, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Learning Environment, Educational Theory and Practice and Well-Being. Ultimately the milestones encompass twenty competencies and sub-competencies, each focusing on a specific skill for educators. Additionally, in keeping with ongoing efforts to foster greater collaboration across the continuum of medical education, the milestones include a supplement identifying which stage (or stages) –undergraduate medical education, graduate medical education, or continuing medical education – the milestone applies.
Each milestone has five defined levels, ranging from novice to expert. For example, in the sub-competency for Educational Theory and Practice titled “Teaching and Facilitating Learning” milestone, a “novice” would be able to identify various teaching techniques. A faculty member would achieve the “expert” level when they can serve as a coach to other educators on effective teaching practices.
Much of Dr. Smith’s talk focused on his work with the milestones at the University of New Mexico, and discussed how organizations and continuing professional development (CPD) offices could operationalize the educator milestones. In 2019, UNM merged its medical faculty development and CME programs under the Office for Continuing Professional Learning with Dr. Smith as Associate Dean. The department’s mission is to provide “learning experiences and resources to healthcare professionals and educators with the intent to change strategy, competence, and performance that improve patient care and learning outcomes.” Dr. Smith said the milestones are a valuable tool across the range of professionals their office interacts with.
“I think you’d be hard-pressed to read any of the 20 competencies and sub-competencies and the milestones pathways associated with them and say that they are unique to the clinical learning environment,” said Dr. Smith. “They are equally applicable to the variety of [advanced practice provider] clinician educators that we have in our health professions program. They’re equally applicable to the PhD faculty that teach at our biomedical sciences program that produce PhD students and postdoctoral fellows.”
Dr. Smith and his team have utilized the milestones as a shared model to drive the professional development of faculty at UNM. Their work started with getting buy-in from leadership within the different clinical departments and offering opportunities to address the needs they were encountering within their educators.
“The thing that was really rich was everyone saying ‘this is giving us the shared mental model, it is giving us the language for talking about what does it mean to progress in different sub-competencies or competencies of education at the medical school,’” said Dr. Smith.
The efforts of the Office of Continuing Professional Learning have grown to encompass learning communities, funding for medical education scholarship, and medical education conferences to share best practices. The office has also developed an “Achievement in Medical Education” certificate program, which incorporates several of the milestones into its curriculum. Although not all CME/CPD offices are structured in same way that UNM’s is, Dr. Smith still believes the milestones are a valuable framework within any academic continuing medical education office.
“‘There is little question in my mind that even in more traditional CME offices, in the CPD/SACME world, Clinician Educator Milestones should be on our radar and should be a part of the conversations that we have and program that we create,” said Dr. Smith. “The idea is to provide an opportunity for a faculty member to look in here and say ‘here’s where I am and here’s where I’d like to be.’”
Gary Smith, PhD is Associate Dean of Continuous Professional Learning at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, Albuquerque, NM.
Raynor Denitzio is the Associate Director, Educational Development and Accreditation at Harvard Medical School.
