The Dexter Fellowship, which was established in 2006 to support and improve the quality of teaching within the Department of Medicine, is offered annually to an early-career faculty member based on their proposal to carry out activities that will improve undergraduate medical education, residency, fellowship or patient teaching, or faculty development.
Bagley has proposed the creation of a Teaching Assessment Committee (TAC) – a small, trainee-led group that could generate timely, consensus-based feedback for clinical faculty members. In addition, he plans to develop a faculty development series centered around highlighting best practices for bedside teaching based on trainee input.
Traditional teaching evaluation systems rely heavily on anonymous trainee evaluations. And, although it’s good-natured, the approach often leads to a frustrating cycle for all involved.
Trainees may have lingering concerns surrounding their anonymity, Bagley wrote in his project proposal, and they may provide non-specific, less effective feedback in an attempt to preserve anonymity. So, in effort to reaffirm privacy and encourage more open and honest feedback, the evaluation responses are often embargoed for an extended period. But that means faculty members don’t receive feedback for months at a time. In addition, faculty members are frequently dissatisfied with the quality of feedback that they receive, citing contradictory statements and feedback that is not behavior based as the primary dissatisfiers.
To combat dissatisfaction on all sides, Bagley proposed a new approach: Within small group discussions, a trained facilitator can compel meaningful responses from trainees, compile consensus-based feedback, identify themes from evaluations and immediately report back to individual faculty members.
These sorts of small group discussions are common in undergraduate programs but are less frequently adopted in graduate and post-graduate programs, Bagley said. They work well because they ensure trainee anonymity and get faculty members behavior-based feedback efficiently.
The TAC method is already in use in the department’s Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, Sleep & Occupational Medicine, in which Bagley serves as an Assistant Professor of Clinical Medicine and Associate Program Director for the Pulmonary & Critical Care Fellowship. He helped implement this program within the division during his years as an IU School of Medicine fellow in Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine.
“… Our faculty members are actively seeking ways in which they can improve based on their TAC feedback,” Bagley wrote.
Goals and Methods of a Department of Medicine TAC program:
Goal #1: Identify common qualities of an excellent clinician educator within the Department of Medicine from the perspective of our own trainees.
Goal #2: Implement Teaching Assessment Committees in fellowships in three other Department of Medicine divisions in 2025, with the goal of developing a process for further dissemination in the department for interested divisions.
Goal #3: Improve Department of Medicine trainee’s ability to evaluate and assess the performance of others by using specific, behavior-based, and actionable feedback.
Goal #4: Develop a faculty development seminar series to improve faculty teaching within the Department of Medicine.
