Medical educators' approaches to in-service learning

The paper identifies the qualitatively different ways these teachers approach the task and explores what it is they focus on and the different strategies they adopt. Postgraduate medical education occurs almost exclusively in an in-service context. The teachers referred to here, the heads of clinical units, are involved in the training of junior medical staff. Doctors spend up to six years in training whilst employed as medical practitioners in the (largely) public health system. This paper focuses on the learning environment of doctors in their first two years of postgraduate training.

The approaches to in-service learning employed by these medical teachers demonstrate some parallels with the approaches of learning held by teachers in the tertiary education sector. For instance, examples of the teacher centred/information transmission and student centred/conceptual change models have been observed. The in-service context creates variations in the way the teachers' intentions are constituted and in the strategies these teachers develop to help their trainees to learn. A phenomenographic methodology has been used to determine the variations between medical teachers' approaches to in-service learning.

It is intended that through studying the variations to be found in these clinical educators' teaching practices, and in the extent to which their teaching intention influences their teaching approaches a deeper understanding of in-service teaching and learning will emerge that can contribute to improvements in-service learning.