Introduction: In health professions education, faculty may feel frustrated or challenged by aspects of their teaching. The concept of a hidden curriculum for students describes the expectations and assumptions enacted in educational programmes that tacitly impact students' learning experiences. A hidden curriculum has been suggested as a possible influence on faculty but has not been well explored. The aim of this study was to explain how a hidden curriculum might operate for faculty in health professions education.
Methods: An interpretivist perspective was used to frame this qualitative study that examined one-on-one interview data generated with 16 faculty members from six different health care professions. Participants were asked to describe teaching experiences that they perceived as demanding. Using a hidden curriculum framework, descriptions of demanding teaching experiences were analysed inductively to identify relationships between a teacher's intended practice and what they could accomplish. These relationships were interpreted as the possible ways that a hidden curriculum was operating for faculty.
Results: A hidden curriculum for faculty was found to operate in three ways by undervaluing the importance of having teaching expertise, undermining teaching goals through institutional conventions and perpetuating feelings of isolation.
Discussion: A hidden curriculum for faculty can be represented as multiple overlapping domains and shape how faculty experience their teaching roles. The results provide examples that reveal how a hidden curriculum may operate for faculty. Faculty developers may find the insights provided by this study useful to make the hidden curriculum visible and help their faculty make sense of and navigate demanding teaching experiences.
© 2023 The Authors. Medical Education published by Association for the Study of Medical Education and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.