Problem: Medical students commonly encounter scenarios in which they are charged with teaching medical content, but studies find a paucity of teaching skills training especially in the pre-clerkship phase of undergraduate medical programs.
Intervention: Videos lessons were created to instruct on five teaching skills identified as useful for presenting short lessons on medical topics: effective learning objectives, appropriate lesson complexity, audience engagement, relevance to practice, and resource selection. A rubric was generated to assess the performance level of each teaching skill.
Context: First-year medical students viewed the video lessons and were instructed to implement these teaching skills for the creation and delivery of weekly learning issue (LI) presentations within a problem-based learning (PBL) course. PBL facilitators assessed students by using the rubric to assign a score of 0-2 corresponding to the level of skill performance.
Impact: Scores in every dimension of our LI assessment rubric showed significant improvement above week 1 at the end of the initial 4 weeks of practice and assessment. Follow-up assessment showed durable performance and significant improvement for 3 out of 5 at weeks 8 and 12.
Lessons learned: Our novel framework was effective in fostering the adoption and implementation of five teaching skills among first-year medical students over a 4-week period, with most skills remaining durable over 12 weeks. Furthermore, end-of-course surveys showed that students found feedback received using the framework helpful in improving their LIs, and faculty reported that student LI presentation quality improved overall.
Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40670-023-01912-x.
Keywords: Learning issue presentations; Medical students; Pre-clinical; Problem-based learning; Teaching skills.
© The Author(s) 2023.