School of Medicine Resident Teaching Skills

Teaching Resident Physicians to Be Educators

medical students listening to teacher

BEST: Bringing Education & Service Together

Bringing Education & Service Together (BEST) is an interdisciplinary "service learning" project for resident physicians.

The underlying concept of the BEST initiative is that residents become better physicians by learning through service: service to their multicultural patient populations through better communication skills, and service to their learners through better teaching skills. Most important, through self-directed learning, participating residents will serve their own educational needs.

List of Curriculum Modules

About the BEST Program

More and more residency programs across the United States - and in other countries – are offering teaching skills training to their residents.

All of the curricular materials from the BEST project are now available on this web site, free of charge. By the end of the curriculum, residents will be able to:

  • Explain the concept of the "teachable moment."
  • Describe the role of the resident physician as team leader and manager.
  • Orient a medical student or intern to a new rotation.
  • List and use the five microskills of clinical teaching with learners of various skill levels.
  • Give skillful and constructive feedback to learners.
  • Run inpatient work rounds, incorporating teaching appropriate to each level of learner.
  • Give a medical student helpful, constructive feedback about charting.
  • Teach a learner how to perform a procedure.
  • Give an interactive mini-lecture for learners at various levels of training.
  • Provide helpful feedback for colleagues about their teaching skills.

The objective structured teaching examination (OSTE) is the only component of the BEST project that is not made available online, in the event that medical educators wish to use it as an outcome measure for their own residents-as-teachers curricula.

Faculty or staff members in medical education who would like to use this resident OSTE may contact the BEST study's principal investigator Elizabeth Morrison-Banks, M.D. at ebanks@medsch.ucr.edu. We provide the cases and rating scales free of charge for research or instructional use in medical education.