Two-Hour Workshop Helps Medical Teachers Look Inward, Study Finds

A two-hour workshop built around critical incidents may be enough to shift how medical school tutors see themselves as teachers, according to an exploratory study published in BMC Medical Education. The research, led by Lukas Daniel Leatemia of Mulawarman University in Indonesia together with colleagues at Universitas Surabaya and Maastricht University, set out to test whether a short, carefully structured session could raise teachers’ awareness of their student-centred beliefs, professional identity, and sense of mission — the inner layers of teaching that most faculty development programs leave untouched.

Most efforts to train teachers in health professions education concentrate on observable skills: how to facilitate a small group, how to ask open-ended questions, how to give feedback. The team behind the new study argues that this focus misses something fundamental. Drawing on Fred Korthagen’s well-known onion model of teacher development, they point out that a teacher’s behaviour sits at the surface, while deeper layers — beliefs about learning, a sense of professional identity, and an underlying mission — shape whether those behaviours are ever genuinely enacted. A tutor can be trained in facilitation techniques, the model implies, but if their beliefs remain teacher-centred, the techniques will ring hollow in the tutorial room.

The researchers designed a workshop specifically to reach those inner layers. It lasted just two hours and was organised into three parts. In the first, identification and formation, tutors reflected on questionnaire items describing student-centred beliefs, identity, and mission, and considered how such inner qualities take shape. In the second, tension exploration, participants examined realistic critical incidents — vignettes of challenging teaching situations — in small groups, discussing the tensions these episodes revealed between student-centred ideals and everyday practice. In the third, actualisation planning, each teacher drafted a personal plan for developing their own student-centred beliefs, identity, and mission in their actual work context.

The study enrolled 26 tutors, purposively sampled from two medical schools in Indonesia, each with at least one year of tutoring experience in problem-based learning curricula. Problem-based learning was a natural setting for the investigation, because the approach depends heavily on tutors who genuinely believe that small-group discussion, student-driven questioning, and collaborative knowledge construction drive deep learning. The participants attended the workshop, completed evaluation questionnaires, and took part in group interviews about their experience.

To measure change, the researchers used the Student-Centred Perspective of Teachers questionnaire, an instrument that probes six domains: environment, behaviour, competency, belief, identity, and mission. Participants completed it before and after the workshop. The largest self-reported increases appeared in the inner domains the workshop targeted. Identity showed the biggest shift, with a mean change of plus 0.27 on the scale and a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.09 to 0.45. Mission followed with a mean change of plus 0.22 (confidence interval 0.06 to 0.38), beliefs with plus 0.19 (0.01 to 0.36), and competencies with plus 0.17 (0.02 to 0.32). Crucially, the confidence intervals for these four domains did not cross zero, suggesting the gains were unlikely to be statistical noise.

By contrast, the outer layers of the onion moved less. Self-reported scores for teaching behaviour and for the perceived institutional environment showed smaller and less consistent changes. That pattern is consistent with the workshop’s design logic: a two-hour reflective session can plausibly sharpen awareness of what one believes and why one teaches, but it cannot reorganise a curriculum, lighten clinical workloads, or transform institutional culture. The researchers themselves flag this asymmetry as a key finding rather than a failure.

The group interviews added texture to the numbers. Participants attributed their self-reported shifts to three elements of the workshop: reflecting on the critical incidents, sharing opinions and experiences with fellow tutors, and creating an actualisation plan. The vignettes were described as realistic and relevant to daily work, which helped teachers see concrete challenges and opportunities rather than abstractions. Discussing questionnaire items with peers opened insights that solitary reflection might not have produced, and the act of writing a personal plan converted vague intentions into specific commitments. At the same time, participants identified environmental barriers — clinical duties among them — that they perceived as obstacles to developing student-centred inner aspects, no matter how motivated they felt leaving the room.

The study’s limitations are clearly acknowledged by its authors. It was a single-group, pre-post design with no control group, and the questionnaire was administered immediately after the workshop, so the results capture perceived awareness rather than demonstrated behaviour change. Self-reported gains can fade, and there is as yet no evidence that the tutors who attended actually teach differently weeks or months later. The sample was also confined to two Indonesian medical schools with problem-based learning curricula, which limits generalisability to other settings and teaching formats. The team is explicit that longitudinal and behaviourally oriented evaluation is still needed before any strong claims can be made.

Even with those caveats, the findings carry practical weight for medical schools and other professional education programs. Faculty development is expensive and time-pressured, and teachers in clinical settings often cannot release more than a couple of hours for training. If a brief, incident-based workshop can reliably raise teachers’ awareness of their own beliefs, identity, and mission — the layers that determine whether student-centred methods are embraced or merely performed — then institutions may have a low-cost lever for cultural change, provided they pair it with structural support. The study also suggests a reframing of what counts as faculty development: not just skill transmission, but guided self-examination.

The research, approved by the Ethics Committee of Abdul Wahab Sjahranie Hospital in East Kalimantan and conducted under the Declaration of Helsinki, was published open access on 12 October 2026. Its central message is deceptively simple: to change how teachers teach, it may help to start by changing how teachers see themselves. Whether a two-hour glimpse inward can seed lasting transformation remains the question the authors themselves are urging the field to test next.

Subject of Research: Faculty development workshop targeting medical teachers' student-centred beliefs, identity, and mission in problem-based learning

Article Title: Enhancing teachers’ awareness of student-centred beliefs, identity, and mission: an exploratory mixed-methods evaluation of a critical-incident workshop

Article References: Enhancing teachers’ awareness of student-centred beliefs, identity, and mission: an exploratory mixed-methods evaluation of a critical-incident workshop. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12909-026-10577-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12909-026-10577-0

Keywords: faculty development, problem-based learning, medical education, teacher beliefs, teacher identity, critical incidents, Korthagen onion model, mixed methods, Indonesia, student-centred teaching, BMC Medical Education, workshop evaluation