Faculty Development – Full Steam Ahead!

Almost 15 years ago, we were facing the challenge to find a name for the GMA committee working on issues that in the Anglo-American languageworld are concisely called “faculty development”. The obvious German term “Fakultätsentwicklung” would not have been very accurate as “faculty” especially in North America denotes the personnel rather than the institution (whereas the German term “Fakultät” almost exclusively denotes the institution). To include both aspects even-handedly – individuals as well as the institution – we decided after some discussion to use the bulky but more precise term “Personalund Organisationsentwicklung” [personal and organizational development] which is also used in other professional fields. We supplemented it with “in der Lehre” [in education] to distinguish it from other aspects of personal and organizational development. As the articles in this themed issue illustrate this was a good choice because the spectrum of initiatives, projects, and scientific activities in the field grew enormously since then. Initially, themain focus was the development and implementation of faculty development initiatives at the medical schools for qualifying the faculty comprehensively to fulfill their tasks in medical education [1]. Meanwhile, all medical schools offer some faculty development for higher or medical education respectively. Furthermore, as a result of the work within the MedizinDidaktikNetz Deutschland, a network of all medial schools dedicated to faculty development [https://goo.gl/WrGFYJ], a common standard for qualification steps in faculty development was achieved. It is much easier now for medical teachers to qualify themselves appropriately and to improve the quality of their teaching. Not only courses for basic knowledge in higher and medical education are offered but also workshops and trainings for more specific tasks in medical education as two articles in this issue demonstrate: Henrike Hölzer et al. report on a training to facilitate small groups with simulated patients [2] and Konstanze Vogt et al. describe a teacher training for problem-based learning [3]. In recent years, a documented qualification for teaching has also become more important regarding academic promotion and tenure, e.g. as a prerequisite for the “Habilitation” (a necessary requirement to apply for a full professorship in medicine). Although the individual teaching merits are still not rated as equally important for promotion and tenure as the individual academic achievements, there is growing awareness that research and teaching should be treated as equal. Furthermore, it is widely accepted now that a qualification for teaching in higher education does not simply appear fromnowhere. As Marianne Merkt states in her comment, there is still a lot of room for improvement in this regard and preliminary work from other countries we can build on [4]. Teaching in higher education is increasingly in the public eye and a topic of political debate. In 2011 for instance, the “Qualitätspakt Lehre” [https://goo.gl/CsdjxS], a political initiative launched by the federal ministry of education and research to promote the quality of teaching and learning in higher education, generatedmany projects at German universities. The dynamic development regarding teaching also sparked a more fundamental debate about what it means to be a good educator in higher education and what we mean by “good education” [5]. A central aspect of this discussion is the request to understand teaching and learning as a scholarly activity (“scholarship of teaching and learning”) and to design the curricula respectively e.g. by research-based teaching [6]. In addition, against the background of the general