Clinician-Educators Want Coaching Programs, Not More Lectures

Key Takeaways

• Faculty development is shifting from episodic support to structured organizational programs with coaching, reflection, and protected time.
• Strongest evidence remains in academic medicine and health professions education, yet the design implications are portable across specialties.
• CME providers can create advantage by replacing lecture series with cohort-based curricula that include peer community and real-world practice.

Clinician-educators are asking for faculty development that behaves more like a structured coaching program than another lecture series. The evidence this week is academic medicine and health professions education–heavy, with some provider-hosted content, so it should be read as a focused signal rather than proof of widespread adoption.

Faculty development is becoming a program design problem

The clearest signal came from a University of Louisville faculty development discussion describing how a centralized program grew out of scattered departmental efforts and an accreditation-driven need to organize faculty support. The discussion around LIAM — Leadership and Innovation in Academic Medicine, later broadened beyond academic medicine — is useful because it gets specific: local leadership development, a cohort model, flipped-classroom preparation, active sessions, and reflection afterward, not a monthly slide deck. The episode also describes demand for locally available leadership development and nearly 200 graduates through the program at the time of recording (Faculty Feed).

This sharpens the thread from an earlier brief on faculty capacity constraints: informal mentorship and one-off workshops are a weak match for the jobs these faculty perform—teaching in clinics and wards, leading teams, building scholarship, meeting accreditation expectations, and sustaining an educator identity.

A second health professions education discussion was more cautious about the underlying literature but pointed in the same direction: clinician educator identity is shaped by relational and organizational factors, including communities of practice, mentors, faculty development, culture, and time constraints. Because that source is a provider-hosted educational discussion, it should not be treated as broad clinician consensus. Still, its critique is useful for CME teams: if organizational culture and lack of time constrain educator development, then content alone will not solve the problem (Teachning and Learning at KI).

For CME providers, the implication is concrete. Faculty development should be designed as a supported pathway: cohort structure, coaching behaviors, practice between sessions, reflection, peer community, and explicit negotiation with sponsoring institutions about time. The question is whether current faculty offerings are built to change educator behavior in the clinical environment, or merely to document that faculty development occurred.

What CME Providers Should Reconsider

• Audit faculty development products for coaching, reflection, peer interaction, and practice between sessions — not just content coverage.
• When partnering with academic centers or health systems, ask whether protected time and local leadership support are part of the implementation plan.
• Review whether structured educator-development programs can be aligned with accreditation and faculty-development requirements without turning them into compliance-only training.

What changed this week

The useful change is specificity. Last week’s faculty-capacity issue could have been read as a general plea for mentorship. This week’s examples make it more operational: build the program, protect the time, create the community, and teach faculty how to coach and reflect in the real clinical setting. CME teams that still treat faculty development as a sequence of expert talks should ask whether they are supporting educators — or just scheduling them.