UME Master Teacher Program
Mission Statement
To develop and support a group of educators that will inspire students
to discover, to think, to achieve and to care.
Not enough teachers. A growing number of medical students. Increasing difficulties maintaining quality educational experiences for students. Too few graduating students selecting family medicine as a career.
While these challenges are not unique to any one medical school in North America, the response of the Office of Undergraduate Medical Education at the University of Calgary is the Master Teacher Program.
Created in 2007, the program’s main objective is to ensure an adequate number of Faculty preceptors to maintain the high quality educational experience that students have come to expect from the University of Calgary. Our secondary objective is to expose medical students early on in their training to generalist physicians, in an attempt to increase interest in these career paths.
Excellence in education
Master Teachers are generalist physicians who have a demonstrated track record of providing excellence in education and have a proven interest in teaching Undergraduate Medical Education. 23 Master Teachers have now been selected to join the program and are provided a salary in exchange for 340 hours of teaching per year, spread across all three years of the undergraduate curriculum.
While it is impossible for a single Master Teacher to be a content expert in all areas of medicine, the Master Teacher concept is based upon the premise that no matter the subject area, an outstanding teacher will have the skills necessary to facilitate the students’ learning. In order to optimize these skills, all Master Teachers complete the University of Calgary Teaching Scholars in Medicine Certificate Program.
Besides teaching in a wide variety of settings, ranging from didactic sessions to bedside encounters with patients, Master Teachers have taken on additional roles including student mentorship, curriculum design and evaluation, administrative positions in UME and faculty development. As well, a number of innovations have arisen from the program including research initiatives, a monthly Master Teacher Journal Club, a monthly Case Studies Session, and family physician shadowing experiences.
To date, the Master Teacher Program has been extremely successful in meeting the needs of our key stakeholders. There continues to be innumerable opportunities for the Master Teacher Program to build upon, with the clear expectation that this Program will have a positive impact on Undergraduate Medical Education not only locally, but also internationally, in the years to come.
Student Evaluation
The Student Evaluation Committee is responsible for overseeing the evaluation of undergraduate medical students’ performance in the Undergraduate Medical Education (UME) curriculum. Student evaluations aim to to be consistent with the goals, objectives and philosophy of the UME program and meet or exceed Liason Committee on Medical Education accreditation standards. All policies and procedures are designed to ensure high quality examinations, including efforts to maximize reliability and validity.
Student evaluations serve several purposes, including:
Assessment of student performance and achievement of curricular objectives
Feedback to students and faculty regarding student learning needs
Program evaluation including identification of strengths and weaknesses in the education program
In order to achieve these purposes, several formats of student evaluation are used including multiple-choice examinations, Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCE), student projects, and preceptor rating scales to name a few . Formal policies have been developed that outline the necessary preparation and review steps for each evaluation method.
The process of student evaluation is constantly under review. Specific criteria are in place to identify unusually difficult or easy examinations, and to identify atypical trends in student performance. Student performance on internal examinations is periodically compared to external examinations as a quality assurance strategy.
Students are included as participants on the Student Evaluation Committee. With the exception of pre-examination planning meetings where content is discussed, the students are included in the policy setting and examination review processes.