Education and the island of misfit toys

Teaching is a core activity for health professionals that pervades our interactions with patients, learners and colleagues and is explicitly outlined as a core competency under the CanMEDS framework. Unfortunately, as Kloek and colleagues point out in this issue of Perspectives on Medical Education [1], teaching is typically assumed to be a skill present in medical graduates and limited education is invested in it. The authors [1] state that ‘training in the medical workforce is not paralleled by the training of their educators in the skills of teaching.’ This is somewhat understandable given how many years are invested in becoming a health professional and pressures on institutions to generate clinical revenues and win grant funding. As a consequence, at many schools (at least in the US) teaching is often assumed to be achievable with any health professional with content expertise (e. g. understanding of medicine). Scholars have studied pedagogical content knowledge – a model aligning educators’ subject matter knowledge and pedagogical knowledge [2]. The pedagogical content knowledge model has effectively been used in educational settings to reframe individuals’ preconceptions, based on their own experiences about how material should be taught [3]. Indeed, up until relatively recently, being a medical or other health professional educator as a career has been seen as being akin to being on the Island of Misfit Toys. As portrayed in a movie, this is an island where toys with