Abstract
Problem
Medical teachers, like many others in higher education, need to help some students cultivate values essential to good practice. However, there is a paucity of evidence-based practical advice about how to exactly do this. While several educational methods are widely accepted as generally useful for such a purpose, specific pedagogical guidance is lacking. Teachers still need to know how to effectively develop values in the classroom.
Research Aim
As part of an existing curricula with teaching methods already understood to be useful, we pursued the development of specific classroom strategies to more effectively cultivate medical students’ values.
Methods
We undertook a year-long action research project with six experienced medical teachers. Data included group discussion meetings, semi-structured interviews, observations and interpersonal process recall of each teacher’s classroom practice.
Results
Participant teachers developed an understanding of values as highly sensitive, in the sense of their relation to an individual’s sense of self. This understanding explained, in part, the challenges teacher participants had experienced in teaching values. From this understanding, participants developed a specific discourse to help one another understand and describe effective values teaching; one of
cultivation
,
placing in sight
and of
moving a student from where they started to another place
. A specific two-part pedagogy was then developed from this discourse: to avoid engendering negative emotion in the student and to implicitly value or ‘believe in’ the student as a person.
Conclusions
Results have implications for teacher pedagogy and development, and in nominating who might best teach values. Further research should focus on the finer points of language and developing a more specific understanding of how teacher ‘caring’ might help cultivate values.