How to Build Your Teaching portfolio: The Mindful Surgeon

I frequently get asked this common question by my junior colleagues about how to build a teaching portfolio. Teaching is something that can score you highly in your interviews and portfolios. In Western countries, teaching is more structured than it was back in my home country. Yes, we did a lot of formal and informal one-to-one teaching as mentors and lecturers. But the importance of teaching in the portfolio is not highlighted as much.

A brief background about myself, I am a surgical trainee, surgical skills fellow for a Surgical Education Centre, and skills tutor for the Royal College. I have a vested interest in teaching because when you teach someone, whether it is a surgical skill, how to do an operation, or how to assess patients in the clinic, you are essentially assessing your own knowledge about the concept. Over the years, I have developed examination and interview workshops, novel surgical skills courses, and international webinars. Right now, I am currently developing an online course for surgery.

So here are my top ten ideas for improving your teaching portfolio: The beauty of it is that it can be applied anywhere in the world. Remember, you get more points for organising regular teaching sessions than just being one of the faculty in someone else’s class. I will also share my top strategy for using your teaching sessions to improve other aspects of your CV, like leadership, research, and communication. I strongly believe in trying to create my own opportunities.

1. Organise Regular Teaching Sessions in your workplace. You can organise regular teaching sessions in hospital wards, medical colleges, or even virtually. This can be for your junior colleagues or for medical students. You can teach topics that are relevant to the ward, like the management of complications and ward patients. To collect maximum points, it has to be conducted at regular intervals over a period of time. You have to collect feedback and summarise it for it to count. If you can, find someone of authority, like a consultant or Director of medical education, to give you a certificate. If you really want to add another dimension, you can do pre- and post-feedback comparisons and make it a quality improvement project to go into your leadership portfolio.

2. Teaching clinical skills sessions: organising skills sessions is another easy way to set up regular teaching sessions. Things like practising suture skills in a surgery ward or cannula placement under ultrasound guidance can be used. You can divide your Juniors into multiple groups and do it over multiple sessions.

3. Organising Journal Club: This is one of the easiest ways you can score some teaching points. Many trusts and hospitals will not have a journal club set up. So, you can take the initiative and set up the journal club at your placement. Speak with the clinical lead or head of department, line up some speakers, get access to some newish articles (your librarian can help with that), and you can start a journal club. Aside from teaching, it is extremely useful to build your critical appraisal skills, which are very useful in academia and postgraduate examinations.

4. Organising Skills Courses: You can organise skills courses like Basic Surgical Skills and Core Laparoscopy Skills for your peers. You need to get some reputable faculty, like consultants and senior registrars, and come up with a set course design. You can also do something very practical.

5. Organising examination Workshop: You can do a mock OSCE for medical students, postgraduate courses, or MRCS. You need to have some faculty and get some up-to-date questions from the recent examination. Try to make the mockup as real as you can and advertise it for free. For example, I organised an MRCS OSCE workshop when I was preparing for my ST3 (registrar) interview and got my deanery to endorse it. You can also run it virtually, but a proper simulation will give you better feedback.

6. Organising workshops: the ST3 interview in the UK training programme is very competitive and stressful. Candidates are always looking to practise the stations and scenarios. So, if you are preparing for a similar interview, you can get some of your buddies to talk to some people who succeeded in the interview. You can then set up an interview workshop. Similar workshops can be set up for things like how to write a paper for a journal or how to apply for funding for a PhD.

7. Organising a Study Day: Study days or workshops can be organised about speciality cases, like having a day with speakers to talk about the latest update in that field of study. It has to be a niche disease like motor neuron disease or metastatic colorectal cancer.

8. Volunteering: You need to do something related to medical teaching to count in your teaching portfolio. Volunteering to help young people from underprivileged backgrounds get into medical school can be used for your teaching portfolio.

9. Medical Education: Medical education degrees such as PG certificates, diplomas, or even master's degrees can score you some points. A lot of universities offer online courses that can be done part-time or completely online. There are also workshops like Train the Trainer by RCS and Teach the Teacher, which you can do to score some points.

10. Teaching Non-Technical Surgical Skills: Teaching non-technical surgical skills, like team management, human factor, developing situational awareness, and communication skills like conflict resolution, can also count towards your teaching. There is plenty of free online material available. If this is not something that you have seen at your place of work, then you can take the initiative to plan teaching on these topics. You will score both in teaching and leadership!

Now, not only can you use these strategies for your teaching portfolio, but you can also use them to boost your leadership profile. If you take the initiative to see the need and then organise an intervention like a teaching session and measure the outcome( feedback), you can use these as quality improvement projects, demonstrate leadership quality, and, if appropriate, also present or publish at local meetings or conferences.

So here are my top ten ideas for teaching. Remember, you need to formalise it by getting formal feedback and a certificate or thank-you letter from your seniors. You need to show some form of proof that it did happen and that you organised or taught it. Let me know how you like these ideas. especially if you used any of these ideas and how you found them. Please also share any ideas for teaching that you have with others.

Remember TANI stands for Train, aspire, nurture, inspire.

If you are looking for a feedback form, download my free template for feedback forms and customize it to your needs. Just fill up a contact form. And I will send the form to you.

If you need help organising teaching or need a framework, drop a line here: https://www.the-tani.com/contact.