Preparing teachers for competency-based medical education: Fundamental teaching activities.

Introduction: The move to competency-based medical education has created new challenges for medical teachers, including the need to reflect on and further develop their own competencies as teachers. Guidance is needed to ensure comprehensive and coherent programs of faculty development to meet the needs of teachers.

Methods: The Working Group on Faculty Development of the College of Family Physicians of Canada developed a new concept, Fundamental Teaching Activities (FTAs), to describe the day-to-day work of teachers.

A teaching skills assessment tool inspired by the Calgary-Cambridge model and the patient-centered approach.

Objective: The aim of this study was to develop a descriptive tool for peer review of clinical teaching skills. Two analogies framed our research: (1) between the patient-centered and the learner-centered approach; (2) between the structures of clinical encounters (Calgary-Cambridge communication model) and teaching sessions.

Method: During the course of one year, each step of the action research was carried out in collaboration with twelve clinical teachers from an outpatient general internal medicine clinic and with three experts in medical education.