My teaching journal includes a variety of logs from varied educational endeavors including ICE/ASCM, CPPH/DOCH, portfolio, leadership activities and educational literature spanning over several years. Reviewing my logs from 2015 is interesting in respect as it gives a documentation of my educational journey and provides the evidence of the conceptual building blocks I have used to move my career forward. The books I have logged include foundational literature regarding medical communication theory. The knowledge I gained through reading these seminal works, provided the theoretically underpinning of the changes I currently wish to make in the Foundations curriculum regarding communication. Furthermore, these logs show how I began using many of the teaching techniques used by master teachers in courses and applied their methods in different settings. Reviewing the logs there is a movement from didactic lecturing, to small group brief interactions, and finally to complex problem solving. Now I do my best to require students to use higher level verbs from blooms taxonomy to interact with their content. I no longer ask students to listen or discuss, I now urge students to deconstruct and analyze. Many of these small group sessions, where I purposefully ignored the defined session’s curriculum and developed my own methods are now part of the UME curriculum.

An example of this is my personal growth in leading portfolio sessions. During portfolio students are asked to critically reflect on clerkship experiences to develop a greater understanding of CanMED roles. My first iteration of teaching portfolio was unstructured, and I allowed the students to talk without any direction. After taking a course on Faculty Development and failing multiple reflections, I learned I did not understand what reflection was. This lead to an introspective reflective process on reflection which brought me to a greater appreciation of the requirements of creating a good reflection. As evidenced by the logs I spent about a year experimenting with methods to teach this to my students. The outcome of this process is portfolio reflective worksheet to give students structure during the session. My students have embraced this approach and tell me they use my worksheet to prepare for their CaRMS interviews. Furthermore, they have nominated me for teaching awards based on these structured sessions.

Journaling is useful in that is provides documentary evidence of one’s growth over time. The major challenge with this process is finding the regular time to keep up. Looking back at the entries elicit a wide variety of emotions and feelings about the journey I have traveled over the last several years and is deeply satisfying. Hopefully, I will find the time to begin journaling again.