144 Chapter 5 as a physician. Therefore, we would emphasise the value of involving faculty developers and mentors who are practising physicians in faculty development. The educator phenotype model could be used as a tool to support FD interventions, in line with the implications suggested in our initial study.7 The growth in competencies of educators can be supported by offering varied tasks and activities, such as a variety of educational responsibilities, practice and instruction by experienced and well respected faculty developers, and (in)formal discussions with peers about the ‘What and how’ of an effective educator. Initiatives that encourage reflection on the ‘self’ and on the teaching and learning process may help the growth in awareness of one’s educational identity. Although the tasks and activities may be similar to those that support growth in competencies, their goal here is to encourage reflection on ‘Who’ one wants to be as an educator. Reflection has also been promoted as a useful instrument for faculty development with regard to educational identity formation.5,6,10 Finally, encouraging educators to reflect on ‘Why’ they want to be a medical educator may nurture a deeper awareness of one’s educational mission. Discussing one’s personal patient-care mission with fellow physician-educators and relating it to one’s educational mission may be helpful in maintaining teacher motivation, even when the organisational culture is not supportive of the maturation of educators. Faculty developers who put their own educational mission into practice are helpful as role models. For the growth of an educational mission, meaningful encounters with students, for example mentoring individual students, may help to shift the focus from one’s own teaching role to the development of the student. Strengths, limitations, and future research suggestions The design of this follow-up study with a 10-year interval between initial and follow-up interviews with dedicated, experienced and exemplary medical educators provides valuable data to gain insight into the long-term maturation of medical educators. Because of our intentional selection of exemplary medical educators, our findings should be interpreted in this light. Medical faculty are primarily trained as physicians; faculty dedicated to providing patient care or research but not to teaching would presumably show different results. Future studies are needed to explore whether faculty that are less dedicated to teaching revert to less inclusive phenotypes over time. Our selection criteria also resulted in a limited number of educators demonstrating maturation, as some of them already had the most inclusive educator phenotype at the first interview. Thus
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