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Background: As students are expected to develop competency in professionalism and medical ethics, faculty are also expected to facilitate medical students' learning and understanding of these areas. One of the main challenges to success in this domain has been uncertainty of whether or not faculty know the content and the methods to teach and assess these competencies. Aim: We used the Objective Structured Teaching Exercise (OSTE) format as a faculty development tool to train and evaluate faculty on how to teach professionalism and medical ethics to students in clinical settings. Methods: The process for the design, development and implementation of OSTEs consisted of five phases: (1) performing a literature review and student needs assessment, (2) developing the OSTE cases and performance checklists, (3) recruiting and training of standardized students, (4) conducting a mock training session and (5) organizing faculty development workshops using OSTEs. Results: Twenty clinical faculty members participated in one of three half-day OSTE workshops offered. Faculty confidence and attitudes about teaching professionalism increased significantly ( p < 0.05) from before participating in the workshop to afterwards. Conclusions: Faculty feedback were positive stating that the OSTE scenarios were reflective of issues they generally encounter while teaching medical students, the information and skills they learned from the workshop are important to them as clinical educators, and that the information and skills will likely have an impact on the way they teach professionalism and ethics in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Physical education teacher education faculty are responsible for educating the next generation of teachers. Despite their significant role, little is known about their characteristics, work preferences, or role responsibilities. The last comprehensive study undertaken to examine these variables was conducted approximately 25 years ago by Metzler and Freedman (1985). The purpose of the current investigation is to describe and validate an instrument for obtaining an updated comprehensive profile of physical education teacher education faculty in the United States. An online survey consisting of six sections was developed. To establish validity and confirm the psychometric quality of the instrument, test–retest was conducted with a subsample of 40 participants. In addition, Cronbach alpha analysis was conducted to provide support for the internal structure of the instrument. The survey accurately identifies and discriminates between the current characteristics and work responsibilities of today's teacher educators and facilitates comparison between teacher educators today to those who completed the survey nearly 25 years ago. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A letter to the editor is presented discussing the authors' work developing a computer-based clinical simulation for psychiatry education.