Advancing Surgical Education Scholarship

Many of you know Dr. Ajit Sachdeva because of his leadership position in surgical education as the Director of the Division of Education in the American College of Surgeons. What you may not know is that he was previously in a number of leadership positions in the ASE including having chaired a task force that was asked to develop a model for recognizing the educational accomplishments of surgery faculty.3 One outcome of this work was an educators' pyramid that shows different levels of achievement in surgical education. Within surgery, Dr. Mary Klingensmith found that there was a significant association between publications on educational topics and advanced academic rank.5 Taken together, these articles show that surgical education has advanced to the point that truly exemplary teaching will be characterized by a scholarly contribution in the form of at least some peer-reviewed publications. [...]it is imperative that surgical educators who are primarily teachers develop a scholarly approach to teaching that is “… demonstrated by documenting a systematic approach, informed by the literature and ‘best practices’ in the field, to the design, implementation, assessment and redesign of an education activity.” [...]I hope 185, 2003, 216-218 7 D.A. Reed, T.J. Beckman, S.M. Wright, An assessment of the methodologic quality of medical education research studies published in the American Journal of Surgery, Am J Surg, Vol. 198, 2009, 442-444 8 M. Albert, B. Hodges, G. Regehr, Research in medical education: balancing service and science, Adv Health Sci Edu Theory Pract, Vol. 12, 2007, 103-115 9 D.A...