AAPM Workshop on Improving the Teaching and Mentoring of Medical Physics

In 2008, Bill Hendee organized the first AAPM workshop on improving the teaching of Medical Physics. This workshop, titled Becoming a Better Teacher of Medical Physics, followed the AAPM 50^th Anniversary Celebration in Houston. Bill believed that the future of the discipline of Medical Physics depended critically on the quality of the training programs for future medical physicists. I don't think that anyone would argue with that. Bill further believed that an important component of that training is the teaching of Medical Physics. While much attention had been paid to training medical physicists as researchers and clinicians, there was virtually no attention paid to training medical physicists on how to become effective teachers. Bill thought that ought to change.

At the time, the training of most medical physicists was contained within a two-year Master's program, so most of the teaching was didactic teaching in a classroom setting. The primary purpose of the 2008 workshop was, therefore, to improve didactic teaching. I had spoken with Bill several times about the workshop, and I was one of the invited speakers at that first workshop. It was well attended, and well received. Building off of the success of the first workshop, and responding to requests for a follow-up, Bill organized a second workshop in the form of an AAPM Summer School. The Summer School, titled Teaching Medical Physics: Innovations in Learning, was held at the University of Pennsylvania and followed the 2010 AAPM Annual Meeting in Philadelphia. The emphasis in this Summer School was again on didactic teaching, although the coverage was expanded to include considerations of the expectations of accrediting agencies and the appropriate use of technology in teaching and learning.

Bill asked me to give the closing plenary talk at the Summer School. In preparation for this talk, I decided to go to the traditional Sunday morning student meeting that was held the previous weekend at the annual AAPM meeting. I asked the students what feedback they would like to give the faculty and administrators of their graduate programs concerning the quality of their Medical Physics education. I felt that, if we wanted to find out how we were doing with our teaching and mentoring, we should go directly to the customers. The feedback was mixed, but passionate. For the most part, students were satisfied with the training they had received in their graduate programs. They thought that the teaching was adequate on average, but that the clinical training, when present, was much better. The PhD students liked the mentoring associated with their research training. But all of these comments were mere side comments. The thing that was really on the minds of the students at that time was the upcoming requirement for a Medical Physics residency. They were really worried about the consequences of the requirement.

Of course, the students were not the only ones worried about the residency requirement. Where were all of the needed residencies going to come from? How were the residencies going to be run?

Were the residencies for the Master's students going to take away from those for the PhD students? A lot of discussion and effort has been focused on the topic of residencies since that time. Residencies now play a fundamental role in the education and training of a clinical medical physicist.

It's been eight years since the last Teaching Workshop/Summer School. People have been asking when it is going to happen again. Two years ago, the Education Council decided that it was time for another teaching workshop. As chair of the Committee on Medical Physicists as Educators (MPESC), I certainly agree the Committee had been batting around the idea of another workshop for a couple of years. It was decided that the best time to have another teaching workshop would be immediately prior to the AAPM Annual Meeting in Nashville in 2018. It's hard to believe, but 2018 is already upon us, and the meeting in Nashville is going to be here before we know it.

The 2018 AAPM Workshop on Improving the Teaching and Mentoring of Medical Physics will take place on 26-27 July (Thursday and Friday) in Nashville, prior to the start of the Annual Meeting. As may be inferred from the inclusion of "mentoring" in the title of the workshop, the emphasis in this workshop is not only on didactic teaching, but also on the mentoring associated with residency training. Many medical physicists who were not involved with residency training previously, either from the mentor or mentee side of things, now find themselves in the position of having to mentor residency students.

An important part of the upcoming workshop will be to have the participants think about residency training within the context of PBL (At Vanderbilt, PBL stands for Practice-based Learning). We will be hearing from two experts on PBL at the workshop. Dr. Kyla Terhune, an Associate Professor of Surgery and the Director of the Surgery Residency Program at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, will be talking about Vanderbilt's residency program and how they use PBL techniques. In addition, Rebecca Howell will talk about using PBL techniques for Medical Physics teaching. Participants will spend time discussing PBL, and will then brainstorm on designing possible PBL exercises for their Medical Physics classrooms or residencies.

Additional topics of talks at the workshop will include an overview of the history of teaching reform in AAPM (George Starkschall), learning about learning from neuroscience research (Laurie Cutting, Professor of Special Education, Psychology, Radiology, and Pediatrics at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University, and member of the Vanderbilt Brain Institute and the Center for Cognitive and Integrative Neuroscience), the importance of teaching reform in Medical Physics (Jay Burmeister), flipped learning in Medical Physics teaching (Stephen Kry), and using the ROMPES modules in the teaching of Medical Physics (Matt Studenski). The workshop will also include various breakout and brainstorming sessions.

The full program for the 2018 Teaching and Mentoring Workshop can be found here, or simply accessed through the link for the workshop at the bottom of the AAPM homepage under What's New? Registration for the workshop will open on 21 March.

It is the hope of both MPESC and the Education Council that the upcoming workshop is as successful as the 2008 and 2010 workshops. Be sure to register early if you are interested in attending!