91 From Critic to Inspirer 3 S11 (Sub)themes What makes someone an effective teacher is when they are able to elevate the interest of the students so that they (competency/related to students) desire to sustain in interaction and to learn more; to really help inspire them. […] If you are really a great teacher (mission/educational field) you come to a topic with a great background of information and you are able to distil that in ways that present new challenges and opportunities. So I think that (competency/related to task as MD) great teachers bring out the best both in themselves and (identity/related to personal role) in those that they are interacting with. (mission/educational field) Great learners are receptive to that and I think that a student could make -or not- a great teacher be effective. (environment/related to students) DISCUSSION The educational beliefs of medical academics influence how they act as teacher and thus influence student learning. One component of these educational beliefs are the beliefs that academics hold about the qualities of teachers themselves. This study aimed to deepen our understanding of medical academics’ beliefs about these qualities. These teacher qualities range from behaviours and competencies to more personal attributes such as the identity and mission of the academic teacher. The theoretical model of Korthagen (Figure 3.1) proved to be a useful model to explore beliefs about teacher qualities. All six elements of the model could be uncovered, though some academics articulated their beliefs about teacher qualities more extensively than others. To better understand the variety of beliefs of individual academics we clustered them into four profiles; in each profile the academics focus on a specific subset of beliefs. We found the profiles to be hierarchically ordered based on the extent of inclusiveness of academics’ beliefs. We will pay specific attention to the two most inclusive profiles, the ‘Role model’ and ‘Inspirer’ profiles, which focus on the two core levels of the onion model of teacher qualities (Figure 3.1), a teacher’s identity and mission. The reason for this
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