92 Chapter 3 is that, as Korthagen35 presupposes, in the development of a teacher’s teaching beliefs the exploration of these two levels is crucial. Reflection on these two levels can help academics to become aware of their professional inspiration and their deeper motivation for teaching (their mission), as well as their professional identity as teacher. This can in turn motivate them to challenge their teaching beliefs and self-direct their own development. Development of the teaching beliefs of academics is relevant when implementing a curriculum innovation, since any change in curriculum design should go hand in hand with the development and change of the teaching beliefs of the academics who implement the innovation.32 The medical academics in both the ‘Role model’ and the ‘Inspirer’ profiles acknowledge the importance of the academic’s identity. This identity is expressed in three distinct roles: the educational role, patient-care role and personal role. Two recent systematic reviews on doctor role modelling also conclude that the medical academic’s role encompasses not only the patient-care and educational domains but also the personal domain, and contains mostly affective attributes.50,51 In another study that compared academics’ beliefs about teacher qualities in preclinical versus clinical contexts, role modelling to enhance a medical student’s personal and professional development was only emphasised within the clinical context.11 However, our findings show that also within the preclinical context, academics believe this teacher quality of role modelling to be important for student learning. Of the three above mentioned identity roles, the academics in the ‘Role model’ profile emphasise the educational role more than other academics. In contrast, the academics in the ‘Inspirer’ profile underline the personal role and characteristics, such as being wise, welcoming the opinions of others, being approachable. This emphasis is in alignment with their focus on the academic’s mission, which has been characterised by Korthagen35 as a ‘transpersonal’ level and should revolve around others, i.e. the students. Academics who are aware of their mission to contribute to the learning of the students realise that the best tool they have to achieve this is their own personality. A recent review concludes that an important aspect underlying the development of an academic’s identity is a ‘sense of commitment.’ This ‘sense of commitment’ can be seen as a teacher’s mission, being described as ‘feeling a deep personal interest in teaching the next generation’ and having a ‘strong value in terms of caring for students.’52 In this review, which focused on the academic teacher’s identity, the relevance of explicating a teacher’s mission remained implicit. Yet, in our opinion, this finding relates the academic teacher’s identity to their mission and underscores the relevance of having an explicit educational mission. While several other studies within medical education have focused on the academic teacher’s identity, the
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTk4NDMw