Dr. Aretz speaks during the program.

Harvard Macy Institute alumni team with PHMI to bring innovative faculty development program to Taiwan

Thursday, October 30, 2008

A pair of alumni from the professional development programs of the Harvard Macy Institute have realized their ambition to bring a similar course to Taiwan. The “Program for Advances in Educational Effectiveness,” held in October, brought together 88 educators and academic leaders representing a dozen Taiwanese and Chinese institutions for a series of discussions and exercises dedicated to enhancing medical education. The course was hosted by Chug Shan Medical University.

“Many medical schools in Taiwan, including Chung Shan Medical University, have paid much attention to the progress of current medical education and the esteem of faculty development,” said Professor Jia-Yuh Chen, President of the host university, in the program’s opening address.

The program was co-directed by Dr. Tom Aretz and Dr. Elizabeth Armstrong, and based on instructional models developed at the Harvard Macy Institute. Aretz and Armstrong teamed with Dr. Ming-Jung Ho and Dr. Jen-Hung Yang to develop the course. 

Dr. Ho, who is Assistant Professor at the National Taiwan University College of Medicine, attended the Harvard Macy Institute’s Program for Leaders in Health Care Education in 2006. Since then, she said, she had “dreamed about bringing the program to Taiwan.” She began to pursue this in her role directing the office of the Taiwan Ministry of Health dedicated to creating faculty development programs for medical educators. Dr. Yang, a professor at Chung Shan Medical University and head of the school’s Center for Faculty Development, attended the Harvard Macy Institute’s program for educators earlier this year. After approaching Dr. Armstrong, director of the Institute, about the possibility of developing a program for Taiwan, he invited Dr. Ho to co-organize the program with him.

Obvious to both was the fact that medical education in Taiwan is centered around the teacher rather than the student. Therefore the course introduced concepts around different learning styles, case teaching, and competency development and assessment. However, Ho and Yang felt that the challenges in Taiwan’s medical education culture called for an innovative approach to not only understanding what must be changed, but also how such reform could be carried out.

“Many educators complain about the structural and cultural barriers to reform,” said Ho. Yang added that his participation in numerous medical education conferences in Asia and the United States had failed to provide him with a clear vision for how to approach medical education reform. “I still had many questions about how to approach this in Taiwan,” he said. “For example, what should be the guiding philosophy of medical education reform? What is the ideal way to reform? How do we set priorities? How do we change individuals and the larger environment? How to we overcome barriers to implementation?” To help the participants explore questions like these, Aretz and Armstrong drew on a wide range of literature focused on organizational and curricular change.

Both Ho and Yang were optimistic that the course would have an impact on medical education reform in Taiwan. “This is absolutely the best faculty development program that has been offered in Taiwan,” said Dr. Yang. “All of the scholars in attendance enjoyed the fantastic learning experiences not only from the formal curriculum, but also the hidden curriculum that Dr. Armstrong and Dr. Aretz demonstrated during the three-day workshop.” 

Added Dr. Ho, whose school was represented by 10 participants, “I think that an important outcome of the program is for participants in each of the 11 medical schools and numerous teaching hospitals to get to know each other and to start to build a community of medical educators who will support and learn from each other.”