Marleen Ottenhoff

186 Chapter 7 The analysis resulted in four educator phenotypes: the Critic, Practitioner, Role model, and Inspirer. These are hierarchically ordered by inclusiveness, which means that phenotype B includes the themes of phenotype A; phenotype C includes the themes of B; phenotype D includes the themes of phenotype C, but not vice versa. The ‘Critic’ phenotype (phenotype A) represents the educators who focus on the environment, in particular on adverse environmental circumstances. The ‘Practitioner’ phenotype (phenotype B) represents the educators who are aware of the environment and focus on their educational behaviours and competencies. The ‘Role model’ phenotype (phenotype C) represents the educators who extend their awareness to include their educational identity. In the ‘Inspirer’ phenotype (phenotype D) the educators are aware of the themes of the other phenotypes and focus on their educational mission (see Chapter 6, Figure 6.2). We found that affective aspects, for example the drive to improve one’s teaching, prevailed in the perspectives of the Role model and Inspirer phenotypes. Educational institute was the only significant factor related to the phenotypes: the Inspire phenotype consisted exclusively of educators from Stanford University School of Medicine. The proposed educator phenotype model provides insight into the variety of medical educators’ perspectives on being a teacher. The most inclusive, Inspirer phenotype highlights the importance of developing a clear personal mission as a teacher, centred around student learning and professional development. The educators within this phenotype significantly more often reflect on personal characteristics such as being receptive to feedback. They apparently are aware that the best instrument they have to achieve their mission is their own personality. In our view, by inspiring their students, they continue to be inspired themselves. Our findings suggest that faculty development interventions should pay explicit attention to affective aspects, and in particular support educators to become aware of their educational mission. To increase our understanding of why educators hold certain beliefs, we aimed to uncover factors that might influence educators’ beliefs about teaching and learning. Since the results presented in Chapter 3 suggest that beliefs are particularly influenced by identity and mission, in Chapter 4 we present a study into the relationship between educators’ beliefs about teaching and learning and their awareness of their educational identity and mission. We used the interviews conducted for the follow-up study presented in Chapter 5 (see below) with the 21 educators who were still available from those who had participated in the initial study. A deductive thematic analysis was performed, employing the two models which resulted from the studies described in Chapters 2 and 3. To examine

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