11 General introduction 1 GENERAL INTRODUCTION Learning-centred education has gained ground in recent decades and is widely implemented in medical schools around the world.1 An important reason for this innovation is that learning-centred education is associated with high-quality student learning.2-11 A core characteristic of learning-centred education is its focus on facilitating student learning and development, as opposed to teaching-centred education with a mere focus on the structure of the content and its transmission by the teacher.e.g.1,12-16 This requires a different role from the medical educators responsible for the teaching: they need to act as facilitators of students’ learning processes rather than focusing only on the transfer of factual knowledge. To properly fulfil this role, educators need to become aware of their beliefs about teaching and learning, as beliefs are important drivers of behaviour. e.g.1522 Indeed, any innovation in which the beliefs of educators responsible for its implementation do not align with the premise behind the innovation, is doomed to fail.23,24 However, we know that a substantial number of medical educators still hold beliefs about teaching and learning that are inconsistent with the learning-centred education context in which they work. e.g.25,26 To effectively encourage learning-centred teaching behaviours, we need to understand which factors influence educators’ beliefs about the teaching and learning process. One of the factors associated with beliefs about teaching and learning is what educators believe about being a teacher.27,28 For example, the more personal views educators hold about themselves as teachers, such as their motivation or enjoyment as a teacher, are suggested to be influential to their beliefs about teaching and learning. The studies which suggest a relationship between beliefs about teaching and learning, and beliefs about being a teacher were carried out in higher education27 and teacher education28 contexts. Therefore, to determine whether such a relationship also exists in the medical education context, we will explore sequentially medical educators’ beliefs about teaching and learning, and their beliefs about being a teacher, and subsequently relate these two areas of inquiry to each other. To prevent confusion between the two areas of inquiry we decided to reserve the term ‘beliefs’ for beliefs about teaching and learning, and to describe beliefs about being a teacher as ‘perspectives on being a teacher.’ We consider the terms ‘beliefs’ and ‘perspectives’ to be similar in meaning. If we can demonstrate a relationship between beliefs about teaching and learning, and perspectives on being a teacher, then it is useful to investigate whether educators’ perspectives on being a teacher are fixed in time, or rather can develop over time towards a more explicit focus on supporting the student and their development.
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