A Curriculum Design and Teaching Experience Created by and for Bioscience Postdoctoral Fellows in a Medical School

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SHORT COMMUNICATION

A Curriculum Design and Teaching Experience Created by and for Bioscience Postdoctoral Fellows in a Medical School Esther Nuebel 1,2

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Sara M Nowinski 1

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Casey W Hemmis 1

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Janet E Lindsley 1

# The Author(s) 2019

Abstract Many medical school postdoctoral fellows (postdocs) lack training in curriculum design and student-centered instruction. A team of bioscience postdocs and a medical school curriculum assistant dean co-created an experience to fill this gap. Kern’s and Kirkpatrick’s frameworks were used for the design and evaluation, respectively, of both the postdoc experience and the undergraduate course they developed. Postdocs taught the course using student-centered methods, especially team-based learning and Just-in-Time Teaching. Following a successful pilot phase, this low resource postdoc experience and undergraduate course are regularly offered. Participating postdocs develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to effectively participate in medical school education. Keywords Postdoctoral training . Curriculum design . Backwards design . Just-in-Time Teaching . Team-based learning . Ownership

Background A group of PhD postdoctoral fellows (postdocs, including authors CWH, SMN, and EN) in the Biochemistry Department at the University of Utah School of Medicine (UUSOM) identified a gap in their training: there was no way for them to gain meaningful experience in curriculum design and teaching while pursuing biomedical research. They recognized their need to build their educational skillset, in addition to acquiring scientific accolades in order to be competitive for, and ultimately successful in, faculty positions. While they had functioned as teaching assistants in graduate school, and there were local opportunities to participate in existing courses, none of these options provided an

Esther Nuebel, Sara M Nowinski and Casey W Hemmis contributed equally to this work. * Janet E Lindsley [email protected] 1

Department of Biochemistry, University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, USA

2

Howard Hughes Medical Institute, 4000 Jones Bridge Rd, Chevy Chase, MD 20815, USA

experience to create a new curriculum or develop skills in learner-centered instruction. The postdocs’ objective to attain educator training aligns well with the need for faculty having these skill sets. Most medical schools invest significantly in faculty development initiatives for enhancing teaching effectiveness [1] and in sending faculty to educational conferences to learn these skills. Medical school administrators are grateful to work with faculty who already understand the basics of student-centered learning and instructional design (including author JEL). In order to address both the needs of the postdocs and medical educators, we developed a new postdoc training experience based on frameworks of learner ownership [2] and collaborative learning [3]. Ownership is an implicit element of constructivist learning theory; educational programs based on ownership focus on the needs, int