Educator Identity Formation: A Faculty Development Workshop

Introduction: Health professions faculty members often struggle deciding on career paths balancing their identities as clinicians, educators, and scholars. Identity formation research has identified three major influences: context, roles, and agency. Identity influences career decisions and, in turn, affects engagement in medical education and faculty development. We designed a single-session workshop to foster educator identity formation.

Methods: The workshop varied from 1 to 3 hours. It explored how identity develops and considered how self, role, and context could be shaped to grow and sustain identity. Participants used a handout called Identity Quakes to indicate satisfaction with their support, engagement, and empowerment. The workshop employed direct instruction to provide language and tools to scaffold conversation and self-reflection leading to future plans aligning participants' professional identities and roles with resources to support further development.

Results: From 2016 to 2020, we offered the workshop to faculty members from diverse professions, including medicine, nursing, dentistry, physical therapy, and others, on 11 occasions (locally, nationally, and internationally) with audiences of 15-200 participants. At offerings that collected evaluations, the workshop received high ratings of 4.61-4.90 (very good-excellent) on a 5-point scale.

Discussion: This single-session workshop is a valuable opportunity to reflect on identity, which faculty members rarely get to do formally. The Identity Quakes handout prompts participants to challenge their assumptions about their professional identities and roles, employ their agency/choice, and consider future career choices.