Identifying the Selection Criteria for Elite Lecturer in Medical Education: A Qualitative Study

Extended Abstract
Background

Faculty members are the core of teaching and learning processes, playing a key role in the education of learners and social accountability of the university. In the context of modern medical education, the selection of an elite teacher with the necessary competencies to train learners can be considered as a motivational force in their desire to improve the quality of teaching and play an effective role.Various scientific resources have defined different competencies for professors. In this regard, Dent, Harden, and Hunt suggested the following criteria: learning facilitator, lecturer, role model, teaching model, clinical instructor, creating educational resources, preparing study guides, course designer, program designer, program evaluator, and student assessor. CanMed in Canada defined seven roles for a clinical professor as follows: medical specialist, communicator, colleague, manager, health supporter, scholar, and professional. These diverse roles represent multiple tasks that faculty members are expected to accomplish. Therefore, to select elite teachers, universities and higher education centers should determine objective and appropriate criteria for the multiple roles of university professors to determine the competencies of professors and evaluate their performance in different ways. In Iran, elite teachers are selected annually in a nationwide festival known as Shahid Motahari Festival, in which every medical university introduces its own elite teachers based on their predefined criteria and the feedbacks provided by the deans of different educational groups. Since the process of electing an elite teacher in Iran is quite subjective and it has few objective criteria, this study aimed to determine some standard criteria for selecting elite lecturers in Tabriz University of Medical Sciences (TUOMS).

Methods

Using a content analysis approach, this qualitative study was carried out in TUOMS, as one of the top ranking medical universities in Iran. In this study, we addressed two main questions: 1) "How can one observe educational justice in choosing an elite teacher?" and 2) "What are the standard criteria for selecting an elite teacher?" This qualitative study was performed in two phases. First, the related literature on the criteria was reviewed and the main domains appropriate to multiple teacher roles were determined through Focus Group Discussions (FGD) with heads of Education Development Center (EDC), Education Development Offices (EDO), and Deputy of Education. In the FGDs, the interviews were recorded with the permission of the participants. Then, immediately after each session, the research team listened to the interviews several times and took notes. The extracted concepts served as a guide for the next session and an in-depth review of the topic. Finally, after summarizing the opinions, a meeting was held with the officials of the Deputy of Education and EDC, in which the indicators, scores of each domain, as well as the type and manner of collecting documents for each domain were finalized. Afterwards, the finalized indicators were sent to the University Education Council for approval and planning the implementation of selecting elite teacher process. To increase the trustworthiness of the study, four criteria of qualitative studies, including credibility, confirmability, dependability, and transferability were observed. For transformability, the details of the research were carefully documented, and the stages of the research were described in detail to enable its evaluation by an external reviewer. For triangulation, methodology and extracted indicators were checked with expert researchers in qualitative studies. Also, data immersion was fulfilled by long-term engagement with data.
Results

Based on the analysis of the interviews, four criteria were identified for selecting elite teachers. The first indicator was "the dynamics of education" with six subcategories, namely, "teaching quantity", "teaching quality", "lesson plan development", "development and implementation of scholarship" and "strategic role in education". The second indicator was "research and educational innovation" with two subcategories of "development of reference books" and "excellence in research based on scientometric indicators". The third indicator was "evaluation of fair treatment" with two subcategories of "evaluation of fair treatment and professional ethics of faculty members by the dean of Education Deputy, deans of educational groups, and the head of the department" and "viewpoint of the TUOMS chancellor about fair treatment and discipline of faculty members". Finally, the last scope was "accountability in transformational innovation packages in education", which was evaluated through a qualitative approach based on the feedbacks provided by the dean of Education Deputy regarding the faculty members’ cooperation in transformational innovation packages in education.

Conclusion

In previous studies, selecting elite teachers was based on students' perspectives, subjective indicators, or the opinion of the department heads. However, in this study, a standard tool was determined to select elite teachers in an attempt to observe educational justice and encourage teachers to perform their various roles and tasks. The results of this study can be used as a standard tool in other Iranian medical universities.