76 Chapter 3 According to Korthagen, the process of a teacher’s professional development will be hindered when problems at a specific level are not tackled by progressing to a more central level, which underlines the importance of increasing our insight into these central levels of teacher qualities. For example, when academics reflect on their mission as a teacher they may discover that their professional inspiration mainly lies in their clinical work and much less in the relationship with students. A dialogue about what motivates these academics in their teaching might help them to become aware of their educational mission, which in turn may cause a shift in their perception of their professional identity and serve as an important motivator to challenge their educational convictions. After analysing the beliefs about teacher qualities, we aim to explore whether profiles, clusters of academics with comparable beliefs, can be delineated. This will enable us to obtain a better understanding of why academics vary in their beliefs about teacher qualities, and to analyse which contextual and personal factors are associated with the academics that are clustered into the same profile. By uncovering the variety in beliefs about teacher qualities through clustering into teacher profiles, and exploring the characteristics of these profiles, we aim to deepen our understanding of the teacher, and in particular our understanding of aspects relevant to academics’ identity and mission, as these are at the core of the educational beliefs of academics and ultimately to their behaviour in class.35 From a more practical perspective, the identified teacher profiles can provide input into how to shape faculty development programmes in medical schools with a student-centred curriculum. Thus, our research questions are: (1) What is the variety of beliefs held by medical academics about teacher qualities? (2) How can the variety of beliefs about teacher qualities be clustered into profiles? (3) What is the relationship between the profiles and contextual (culture and organisation of the medical school, discipline) and personal factors (gender, teaching experience, teaching roles, educational tasks)?
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