145 The maturation of medical educators 5 the factors we identified as contributing to maturation are exploratory in nature. It would be useful to repeat this research with less experienced educators; such a study would be expected to yield more educators with growth potential and could confirm the factors found in our study. Conducting this research with educators involved in educating medical students, but who are not practising physicians, could provide further insight into the applicability of the educator phenotype for educators from different backgrounds. In addition, it would be interesting to explore what these educators, if they show maturation, indicate as motivating their maturation. We focused interviews on educators involved in the preclinical curriculum. This limits drawing general conclusions for clinical or postgraduate contexts. Nevertheless, because the awareness of certain distinct qualities, once acquired, is deeply integrated into the person of educator, we expect that our results are not limited to a particular educational context. A future study carried out in other educational contexts could provide further insights. CONCLUSION This study provides evidence for the maturation of medical educators. Maturation is influenced by the educational context and appears to proceed through certain developmental stages, from focusing on educational competencies to a growing awareness of educational identity and a deeper understanding of educators’ personal educational mission. Maturation is a multifactorial and complex process, which implies that faculty development initiatives need to be varied and differentiated and preferably extend over a long period of time. The interventions can be summarised as supporting the reflection on the ‘what and how,’ ‘who’ and ‘why’ of being an effective educator. Since medical educators indicate that their teacher role is inspired by their patient-care role, we recommend including educators’ patient-care role in faculty development initiatives and involving practising physicians as faculty developers to support the maturation of medical educators. Acknowledgements The authors wish to thank the medical educators who took part in this study.
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