Different Approaches, Common Goals: Analyzing Medical Educators’ Teaching Styles

İngilizce (OpenAlex)

Medical education requires the combined use of several different methods due to its involvement of theoretical and clinical educational practices. In general, educators, including those in the field of medical education, adopt teaching styles that they shape based on their personal preferences, skills, and beliefs, in which they apply these methods for the sake of quality education. In this study, it was aimed to identify the teaching styles of medical educators at medical schools. The sample of this descriptive study consisted of 272 medical educators working at medical faculties in Türkiye. The data of the study were collected using the Teaching Styles Inventory. The Inventory has 5 teaching styles: expert, formal authority, personal model, facilitator, and delegator. The analyses included frequencies, means, t-tests, the Mann–Whitney U test, one-way ANOVA, the Kruskal–Wallis test, and correlation analyses. It was determined that 53.8% of the participants were women, 34.6% were professors, 80.9% were working at public institutions, 56.6% were in internal medicine branches, 37.8% had a work experience of 16 years or more in the profession, and 68.8% did not have administrative duties. The mean numbers of projects and articles in which the participants took part within the last 5 years were 4.29 and 15.16, respectively, while their mean number of teaching hours per week was 9.16. The participants were found to use the expert, facilitator, and delegator teaching styles at high rates, while they used the other teaching styles at moderate rates. Gender, institution of employment, and title were not significantly associated with the teaching styles of the participants, whereas their administrative duties and experience were significantly related to their teaching styles. Accordingly, the participants with more experience in the profession preferred the personal model, delegator, and facilitator styles more, and those who had administrative duties preferred the facilitator style more. The teaching styles of the participants were not significantly related to their age, the number of articles or projects in which they were involved, or their weekly teaching hours. It was determined that medical educators working at medical schools possessed the knowledge and expertise needed by students, and they preferred the personal model, facilitator, and delegator teaching styles, which indicate a democratic environment in educational processes.