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Introduction Mentorship is a vital component of academic and professional development. Mentees report positive impacts from mentorship programs, yet institutions and societies may struggle to meet their mentees’ needs due to factors such as mentor fatigue and lack of mentor training. To address this in our own professional society, the Association of Pediatric Program Directors, we developed a mentor toolkit in order to utilize a variety of mentoring models, provide faculty development for midlevel mentors, and offer guidance to mentees. Methods Most of these tools were designed to be administered in an interactive format such as a workshop or seminar with think-pair-share opportunities. The toolkit begins by providing a definition of mentoring and reinforcing the benefits and the characteristics of effective mentoring relationships. Next, we discuss the important role that mentees have in creating and maintaining effective mentoring relationships (i.e., mentee-driven mentoring). We then introduce a mentoring mosaic activity designed to help mentees examine their professional network and think about how they might expand it to fulfill the spectrum of their mentoring needs. Next, we present guidelines for the implementation of four mentoring models that can be used within one's institution: traditional dyadic mentoring, peer group mentoring, meet the professor mentoring, and speed mentoring. We then provide tools that can be used to help facilitate effective mentoring development. Results This toolkit has successfully served as a self-guided resource at national meetings for many years, garnering positive feedback from mentors and mentees alike. Discussion The principles and methods are easily generalizable and may be used to guide mentorship programs within institutional and professional societies, as well as to assist mentors and mentees in optimizing their individual mentoring relationships.

Introduction The Clinician-Educator's Handbook addresses a wide variety of issues in clinical education and looks at many different settings in which clinical teaching takes place. The ultimate goal of clinical teaching is to improve patient care, and this handbook is designed to help the clinician-educator do the best possible job of teaching. Culling the literature on educational psychology and medical education, and drawing from their own observations and experiences, as well as those of many renowned clinician-teachers whom they observed and interviewed, the authors have created a physician-friendly work, written in the language of the clinician rather than of the educational theorist. Methods This resource contains a 20 chapter book on how to conduct clinical teaching. Chapters are arranged by topics ranging from designing the educational experience to bedside teaching to leading a case discussion. An instruction guide explaining how to best use the resource is also provided. Results Numerous personal communications have been received by the authors describing the usefulness to clinician-educators. The website has received over 1600 hits over a 9-month period. Discussion The Clinician-Educator's Handbook addresses a wide variety of issues of clinical education and looks at many different settings in which clinical teaching takes place The authors acknowledge that they have neither the experience nor the expertise to address issues involved in teaching surgical skills or in teaching in certain environments such as the operating room or the intensive care unit, so these areas are not covered in this book. While the authors are pediatricians, they believe that this book will be of interest to all physicians who wish to improve their teaching skills and hope that all readers will find this book enlightening, challenging, and useful.

This resource is a tool for the evaluation of educator portfolios, based on measurable outcomes designed to allow reproducible analysis of the quality and impact of educational activities. The analysis tool is organized in tabular format and combines 18 quantitative, 25 qualitative, and five holistic ratings. We sought a balance between qualitative and quantitative items in a tool that captured important nuances of educational performance but was not too long to preclude practical use by a promotions committee. A unique feature of this tool is the inclusion of seven index scores that combine several quantitative measures to measure depth and impact of an educational activity. For example, the curriculum impact index, which measures the impact of all the curricula developed by a faculty member, combines for each curriculum the number of learners taught, a geographic impact score, and an implementation score. Qualitative items are scored on a 3-point rating scale; verbal specifications for an intermediate rating are provided. The accompanying instructions for use provide step-by-step guidance on how to score both quantitative and qualitative items with specific examples. Use of this comprehensive-yet-practical tool is offered as a method to enhance opportunities for the promotion and advancement of educators, based on well-defined and documented educational outcome measures. It is relevant for clinical educators across disciplines and across institutions. Our lessons learned as a consensus development team may prove useful to other raters who use or adapt this tool. Evaluation of quantitative items taught us repeatedly to keep it simple. Proliferation of items is tempting, but a focused selection of essential items makes the tool practical. Evaluation of qualitative items needs to be grounded in sound principles that are clear to the rater. Specification of ratings for each item was critical to achieve concordance in our qualitative ratings.