I would like to start with an African Proverb: “If you want to go fast go alone, if you want to far go together”. This sums up my personal and professional philosophy. I have had the honor to be engaged in direct patient care, teaching, and mentoring. I have enjoyed practicing emergency medicine and pediatric emergency medicine for the last 28 years. It has been a great privilege to care for patients under some of the most vulnerable and stressful conditions. This is though one patient at a time, when you are an educator you can multiply your efforts in great magnitude and touch the lives of even more patients. This is a role that I take very seriously.Preparing medical students to care for patients is a unique opportunity. I have participated in the education of many types of health care providers: pre-hospital, nurses, physician assistants, medical students, and physicians at different levels of expertise and across different specialties.
I aim to develop the learner’s understanding of caring for patients to encourage mastery, competency, critical thinking, and problem solving. It is important to provide the learners with a variety of learning activities and experiences. I like to elicit the learner’s knowledge and beliefs, and in turn build upon and refine during the learning process. I value helping learners understand difficult information. My role is to model for them complex ways of thinking so that they can become masters in the medical field. Additionally, I like to foster reflection both in large and small groups and serve as a guide and facilitator encouraging learners to accept responsibility for their own learning. I also like to encourage learners to respond to one another ’s ideas and to encourage respect for all learners with different backgrounds, and experiences. I encourage learners to share their perspectives and support them with evidence. Finally, it is important that the assessment tools are aligned with teaching goals and teaching methods and in turn, reinforce the priorities and context of the discipline both in content and type. Feedback is an important aspect of facilitating their development. I like an environment of safe, low-stakes supportive context.
Finally, I know that I still have much to learn to continue to be an effective physician educator. To continue to grow as a teacher myself, I participate in ongoing educational activities and reflect on my teaching to allow learners to develop and grow as health care providers.
