Faculty development activities
The Office of Medical Education has a dedicated faculty development team available to support all clinical teachers. We offer faculty development opportunities at the system, department and individual level, including the Clinical Teacher Program which aims to empower physician teachers. A wide variety of topics are available to meet learner and program needs.
Meet your faculty development team
Shan Abbas, MD
Medical Director for Faculty Development
Spencer Gillis
Director, Medical Education Operations
Cassandra Kearney, PhD, MA
Faculty Development Specialist
Paige Parmelee-Ketner
Institutional Coordinator
Shan Abbas, MD
Medical Director for Faculty Development
Spencer Gillis
Director, Medical Education Operations
Cassandra Kearney, PhD, MA
Faculty Development Specialist
Paige Parmelee-Ketner
Institutional Coordinator
Lynn Shackelford, MEd
Faculty Development Specialist
Our mission statement
The mission of Faculty Development at Corewell Health is to assist faculty to flourish as clinicians, educators, scholars and leaders in a stimulating academic and clinical environment. We focus on the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and attitudes essential to provide quality education in an empathetic, respectful, team-oriented, and value-based approach.
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Faculty development activity goals
- Create opportunities to fulfill ACGME-requirements to earn CME-credit
- Encourage faculty to share best practices, discuss weaknesses, educational challenges and opportunities in relation to medical student and resident and fellow physician education
- Systematically improve the learning environment for our trainees and faculty to ensure patient safety and increase collaboration
Our team is also proud to offer our hybrid Clinical Teacher Program (CTP) and Clinical Teacher Program for Surgeons! The hybrid modality allows participants to maximize their learning and training while being cognizant of their limited time to attend courses in person. The course also includes simulated teaching scenarios to practice the techniques discussed in the course. More information on this course can be found on the Clinical Teacher Program website.
Additionally, we have a menu of options, or we can meet and build development programs. We can facilitate face-to-face, virtual synchronous and asynchronous, or hybrid programming as needed. Our team is also available to review your goal and objectives documents and evaluations to ensure your curriculum is aligned with the ACGME requirements.
Services we offer
The faculty development team is excited to support the education of our graduate medical educators.
- Departmental retreats: Some programs organize annual retreats for their senior residents, fellows, core-faculty or department. Often these retreats are focused on a specific topic or area of concern. We are also able to facilitate teambuilding exercises and activities. A retreat offers the possibility to discuss topics in a more relaxed atmosphere where faculty may be more open to sharing ideas, opinions, feedback and challenges.
- Program-specific presentations: We are happy to develop a program-specific session for your faculty. In collaboration with the program director, the specific needs are discussed and based on this conversation a tailored topic or program is developed. The length of these sessions can vary (between 20 - 90 minutes) depending on the session's goals, the topic and the specific issue that needs to be addressed. We can facilitate face-to-face, virtual synchronous and asynchronous, or hybrid programming as needed
- Snippets: We host a series of short development videos on various topics related to medical education. These are continually updated with new and novel teaching topics. Videos are typically 4-10 minutes long and can be used on an individual level or during department/section meetings. Each video has a discussion guide that the facilitator can use to create an engaging and meaningful discussion with their faculty. You can access these videos on our internal SharePoint page.
- Virtual Faculty Development offerings: The faculty development team hosts internal and external speakers on current teaching trends or issues in medical education. These presentations are hosted in the evening over Teams. Presentations are also recorded so a repository of educational content can be accessed on our internal SharePoint page.
- Individual teaching consultation: Occasionally, faculty have questions that might not be of interest to other colleagues, aspects related to their personal growth, questions about collaboration, about team culture, or dealing with a difficult learner—we would be happy to meet with faculty one-on-one to offer support, guidance and tools to improve in key educational areas.
- Curriculum Development: Our team is available to help with rotation curriculum document support, ACGME Milestone support, and evaluation and assessment consultation.
- Medical Education Scholarship: Through consultation, we offer faculty, fellow and resident physicians’ guidance and opportunities regarding their medical education projects.
Faculty development topics
Click on each title below to review topics offered by the faculty development team.
Best practices for clinical educators 
- Supervising skills: We outline different frameworks and approaches for effective learner supervision.
- Clinical skills teaching: We explore Peyton’s four step model to teach clinical skills and we discuss how it can be adjusted to different teaching situations.
- Bedside teaching (Inpatient): We discuss techniques to create a bed-side teaching experience in which the whole team is involved and that is safe for both the learner and the patients
- Teaching in ambulatory care (Outpatient): We share techniques specifically applicable for teaching in busy ambulatory care settings.
- Precision in language: We discuss the importance of clear and precise communication in medical education, barriers to effective communication, and strategies to improve the precision of your language choices in teaching.
- Teaching psychomotor skills: We define psychomotor skills and complex learning, explain the phases and steps of learning a skill, and share best practices of giving feedback while teaching a skill
- Best Practices of teaching in the operating room: We discuss how to best prepare you and your learners for teaching in the OR, including staging, operating, and feedback.
Techniques for observation, assessment & feedback
- Observation: We explore the key elements of effective observation.
- Feedback (providing): We outline how to give feedback in a short amount of time, highlighting Pendleton’s rules of giving feedback as an effective approach.
- Feedback (receiving): We explore how feedback is being processed and learner’s and teacher barriers that may prevent the message from being effectively received.
- Feedback (seeking): We discuss how faculty and learners can enhance feedback seeking, and we teach five questions learners can ask to get more specific feedback.
- Feedback and emotions: We explore why emotions are often provoked by providing and receiving feedback and we will explore what these emotions are, and how they affect our feedback conversations.
- Video feedback: We describe the strengths and the weaknesses of video-based feedback and how it can be used in our routine practice.
- Milestones & Evaluations (ACGME): We outline how the ACGME-milestones can help team-members to make formative and summative assessment of learners stronger.
- Workplace based assessment: We explore the different tools that can be used to assess learners (medical student, residents and fellows) to assess the learners in the workplace, such as: Mini-CEX, 360-degree feedback, Skills observation, and feedback.
- Effective debriefing: We discuss the role of psychological safety in debriefing and models for leading an effective debriefing conversation.
Supporting difficulties in learners and education
- Micromanagement: We explore the consequences of micromanagement for the learners, the team, the micromanager and the learning environment.
- The struggling learner: We discuss how the struggling learner can become visible, the different types of learner’s struggles, how this can affect the team and other learners, and next steps for supporting struggling learners.
- Teaching when time is limited: We explore a variety of didactic techniques and their backgrounds of activities that can be performed in the clinical setting which are not time consuming
- Motivation: We discuss concepts of internal and external motivation and the important elements contributing to motivation: relatedness, autonomy and competence.
- Creating a safe learning environment: We explore the four components of a learning environment and give suggestions how the learning environment can become more safe
- Difficult conversations: We outline the COIN feedback model to help us in preparing and being involved in a difficult conversation.
- Generational differences: We discuss myths about generational differences in medical education and strategies for effectively teaching today’s learners.
Classroom teaching techniques
- Teaching large groups: We explore the group dynamics, challenges and pitfalls when teaching a large group and discuss activities to get participants involved.
- Teaching small groups: We outline the group dynamics, challenges and pitfalls when teaching a small group and discuss activities to get participants involved.
- Lecturing: We discuss techniques to make your lectures interactive and how you can work during lectures on information processing in your learners.
General teaching techniques
- Adult Learning Theory: We share techniques and approaches for effectively teaching adult learners.
- Teaching professionalism: We discuss best practices of teaching professionalism to your learners.
- Improving your own Emotional Intelligence: We discuss the importance of self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management to building your own emotional intelligence.
- Learner-oriented teaching: We explore how you can guide the learner on the cognitive, affective and meta-cognitive level, while minimizing your involvement as a teacher.
- Microteaching: We outline the snippets methods. How can you teach effectively for 15 minutes, using the ‘snippet’ format.
- Questioning: We explore the levels of Bloom’s taxonomy and discuss how to formulate questions that pertain to learners on different levels
- Presentation skills: We outline the basics of a good presentation
- Goal setting: We explore the challenges of setting an actionable goal for yourself and your learners using the SMART-model.
- Individual learning plan: We define the use of an Individual Learning Plan (ILP) from a faculty, resident and learning perspectives and show examples of ILP’s being used.
- Mentoring: We explore the essential components necessary from both a mentor and mentee perspective to create a successful experience.
- Coaching learners: We discuss different techniques of how learners can be coached in the clinical setting and beyond.
- Creativity in education: We explore the benefits of creative elements in education: reflective writing, poetry and drawing.
Collaborating on teams and teambuilding topics
- Teambuilding: We list and describe team roles and investigate what roles are represented on your team and which ones are missing and how that may impact the team’s ability to function effectively.
- Group dynamics: We share the different roles that exist in groups and how it can affect the group atmosphere.
- Team and diversity: We identify how cultural and international backgrounds of faculty and trainees can affect the educational environment in positive ways.
- Interprofessional collaboration: We discuss how to incorporate the core competencies of interprofessional collaboration into your team values, principles and practices.
Teaching & technology
- Virtual education: We explore best practices for online education and outline tools and techniques to make your teaching interactive and engaging.
- Teaching & telehealth: We discuss the best practices of virtual bedside manner and how to effectively teach residents to be effective telehealth physicians.
Fellow and resident curriculum
- Creating goals & objectives: We explore how to create measurable goals for your curriculum and the relationship between goals and objectives.
- Determining appropriate instructional strategies and assessment methods: Based on created goals and objectives, rotation responsibilities, and duties, we identify effective instructional methods and assessment tools.
- Creating evaluations that correspond with curriculum objectives: Using identified objectives and competencies, create evaluations that measure outcomes for those specific targets, ensuring that skills trained are skills measured.
- Understanding the ACGME curricular requirements, accreditation system and Milestones: Using the ACGME Milestones specific to each program/specialty, we ensure that curriculum goals and objectives are aligned with these outcomes-based Milestones where appropriate.
- Applying ACGME Clinician Educator Milestones: We examine this comprehensive clinician educator tool and discuss methods for incorporating these universal pillars and competencies into improving teaching and mentoring skills.
Medical education scholarship
- Medical education research: We explore different opportunities for publishing in medical education for beginners and those seeking more experience.
- How to start writing and keep going: We describe tools that can be helpful in academic writing.
- Qualitative research design: We introduce key concepts of and approaches to qualitative research.
- Presenting your research: We discuss key concepts of and approaches to effectively present your research.
- (Re)designing curriculum: We introduce you to curriculum development design and research. It is intended to be a starting point for anyone interested in creating research related to medical education curriculum.
Faculty development request
To request faculty development for your program, please follow the link.