Abstract
BackgroundIn a professional learner-centered(ness) educational environment, communication and alignment of expectations about teaching are indispensable. Professional education of residents could benefit from an analysis and comparison of teachers’ and residents’ educational expectations and beliefs. Our purpose is to identify success factors and barriers related to aligning expectations and beliefs and building a supportive professional learner-centered educational environment.MethodsWe conducted semi-structured individual interviews with teachers and semi-structured focus groups with residents. A single interview format was used to make it possible to compare the results. Data were analysed using a qualitative software package (AtlasTi). Data analysis steps were followed by the author team, which identified four domains of good teaching: personal traits, knowledge, relationships and teaching qualities.ResultsTeachers and residents agreed about the importance of personal professional characteristics like being a role model and having an open and enthusiastic attitude. They all thought that having a specific knowledge base was essential for teaching. Approaching residents as adult learners was found to be an important element of the learner-centred environment and it was agreed that teachers should take practical experiences to a higher level. However, teachers and residents had different expectations about the practical consequences of being a role model, adult learning, coaching and openness, and the type of knowledge that was needed in the professional development program. Communication about different expectations appeared to be difficult.ConclusionsTeachers and residents agreed on a conceptual level about expectations and beliefs regarding good teaching, but disagreed on an executive level. According to the residents, the disagreement about good teaching was not the biggest barrier to creating alignment and a supportive professional relationship; instead, it was the absence of a proper dialogue regarding issues about expectations and beliefs.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/1472-6920-14-211) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
In a professional learner-centered(ness) educational environment, communication and alignment of expectations about teaching are indispensable
We found that teachers see ‘openness’ as revealing one’s strengths and weaknesses, and they expect the residents to do the same
Openness means that teachers give transparent feedback and are willing to share their professional experience with them
Summary
In a professional learner-centered(ness) educational environment, communication and alignment of expectations about teaching are indispensable. Under the influence of current educational theories, learnercenteredness has become the main focus of postgraduate medical education in the past 20 years [1,2,3,4,5,6,7] In this learnercentered environment, residents are expected to actively take responsibility for their learning processes, make learning plans and express their learning needs to the teachers [8,9,10,11]. Because the learning plans and needs should be aligned with the program’s educational goals and the way teachers prefer to teach, it is important that residents and teachers be able to exchange expectations and beliefs about teaching. Because the main purpose of the program is to support residents in learning and applying their knowledge in practice, alignment between teachers and residents is extremely important
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