Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges
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Debate about faculty roles and rewards in higher education during the past decade has been fueled by the work of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, principally Scholarship Reconsidered and Scholarship Assessed. The author summarizes those publications and reviews the more recent work of Lee Shulman on the scholarship of teaching. In 1990, Ernest Boyer proposed that higher education move beyond the tired old "teaching versus research" debate and that the familiar and honorable term "scholarship" be given a broader meaning. ⋯ The scholarship of teaching remains elusive, however. The work of Lee Shulman and others has helped clarify the issues. The definition of this form of scholarship continues to be debated at colleges and universities across the nation.
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Since the late 1980s faculty and staff at the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) have actively sought to align their school's academic culture and promotional process with its mission of educational excellence and innovation. As one of the top 50 medical schools receiving NIH funds, MCW has well-established mechanisms to evaluate and recognize the scholarship of discovery. Understanding, evaluating, and recognizing the value of individuals engaged in the scholarship of teaching, however, required changes in individuals' beliefs and in the MCW's promotion processes and organizational infrastructure. ⋯ Retrospectively, this strategy was consistent with John Kotter's eight-step change model, which the authors apply as an organizing framework for this case report of educational evolution at the MCW. Through creating a guiding coalition, developing vision and strategy, generating short-term wins, and anchoring new approaches in the MCW's culture, the MCW has made substantive progress in recognizing and rewarding educational scholarship. Changing academic cultures to value education is itself an educational process, requiring persistence and the ability to teach others about educational scholarship and its associated criteria.
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To compare the results of academic promotion to associate professor and professor via the teaching pathway at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine (WFUSM) with the criteria of the "educators' pyramid" of Sachdeva et al. ⋯ The findings suggest that the educators' pyramid is generalizable to medical faculty being promoted on a teaching pathway at WFUSM. Documentation of achievement in teaching criteria is essential and faculty should be encouraged to maintain records of accomplishment before becoming candidates for promotion.