157 General discussion 6 GENERAL DISCUSSION The studies presented in this dissertation were performed to increase our understanding of how medical educators working in learning-centred education contexts mature over time, and how this maturation is related to their beliefs about teaching and learning. This central goal led to the following main research questions: 1. What are the content and structure of medical educators’ beliefs about teaching and learning? 2. What is the variety of medical educators’ perspectives on being a teacher? How can this variety be clustered into educator phenotypes? 3. How are medical educators’ beliefs about teaching and learning related to the awareness of their educational identity and mission? 4. To what extent do medical educators mature in their perspectives on being a teacher over time, and which factors contribute to this maturation? In this chapter we will discuss our main findings, conjoin them and relate them to the current literature. We have explored educators’ maturation from a holistic perspective. This means that we not only examined how they perceive their behaviours and competencies, but also how they perceive the educational context, their identity and mission as teachers, and what they believe about learning and teaching. This led to the two main lines of our research, which are: the beliefs of medical educators about the process of teaching and learning, and their perspectives on being a teacher. After discussing these two lines of research, we will discuss two themes that emerged from our research findings as particularly relevant: the role of the environment, and the role of mission. This culminates into a discussion on the maturation of educators. Finally we conclude this chapter describing the strengths and limitations of our research project; suggestions for future research; and specific recommendations for practice. Beliefs about teaching and learning Our exploration of medical educators’ beliefs about teaching and learning led to a better understanding of the content and structure of the diverse beliefs, and resulted in a new framework, contextualised in the medical education context (see Chapter 2, Table 2.1). In Chapter 2 we discussed the changes required to adapt the original framework of Samuelowicz and Bain1 to the medical education context. Here we will discuss the main results, and elaborate in more detail on the significance of our findings for learning-centred education.
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