Residents as Teachers

Our residents hone their medical knowledge and leadership skills with multiple teaching opportunities. During inpatient months, senior residents guide interns, and both senior residents and interns teach medical students. On elective rotations, all residents are assigned to present at teaching conferences. In addition, we take time as part of our curriculum to focus on improving our residents’ abilities as teachers throughout the year.

Our second- and third-year residents have multiple rotations where they lead teams, consisting of interns and/or medical students. In addition to their patient care duties, senior residents are responsible for facilitating teaching and learning on these teams. Many resources are available to help our seniors teach, including MKSAP, journals through our medical library, our inpatient curriculum modules, and access to UpToDate. As a senior resident, you will have the independence to decide how to teach on service, and you will develop teaching skills and tools to fit your interests and the needs of your team.

We welcome University of Washington third- and fourth-year medical students on our inpatient teams and outpatient general medicine clinics. While on the inpatient service, medical students are taught by all the members of the team, providing opportunities for interns and senior residents to mentor and teach, and these interactions lend richness and depth to the experience as teachers, in turn enhancing our own learning. In addition, residents volunteer to run a weekly medical student didactic. For those interested in deepening their involvement, resident members of the Medical Student Teaching Committee assist with developing the rotation and enhancing the medical student experience at Virginia Mason under the mentorship of core faculty.

As a resident, teaching is a core part of your duties, whether it is to teach medical students, interns, or even your co-interns/co-residents. Many of our residents ultimately join programs as teaching faculty, either as hospitalists/primary care physicians or following fellowship. For these reasons, one of our goals is to design a curriculum to not just give residents the opportunities to teach but also help them hone their teaching skills in a variety of settings. This is done through a mix of didactics put together by some of our expert teaching faculty as well as workshops for residents to practice their skills.

Each year we spend time focusing on our teaching techniques and developing new skills at our spring retreat. The retreat is attended by rising second- and third-year residents and core faculty. We discuss how we can incorporate teaching into our daily work and explore teaching frameworks and techniques to facilitate learning while on the wards.

Throughout the year, residents lead a variety of conferences and will usually present six to eight conferences a year in addition to assigned specialty conferences, providing them with ample opportunity to develop skills in creating didactics and teaching in a variety of group settings. Specific details regarding the conferences are outlined under the Conference section.