The Transformational Times is Taking a Sabbatical (although the blog will continue)

From the September 29, 2023 issue of the Transformational Times

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The Transformational Times is Taking a Sabbatical

Adina Kalet, MD, MPH

Born on the fly to keep our medical community thoughtfully connected through the pandemic, the Transformational Times--like the rest of the world--is establishing its “new normal.” To do this, we are pausing weekly publication to gather reader input and intentionally consider how best to serve our community while continuing to reflect the transformational work at the Medical College of Wisconsin around character and caring alongside clinical excellence. Dr. Kalet shares what will happen behind the scenes, and invites readers to help shape the future of this thoughtful, medical education publication by participating in our survey ...

 

Dear Readers,

September is a time for renewal. Kids are back in school, the summer has come to an end, and in my faith, we gather to celebrate the birth of the world through our “high holy days.” At the Kern Institute we have been taking time to reflect and plan. We spent a day in retreat a couple of weeks ago, to contemplate where we have been and consider where are going next. In that spirit, the Transformational Times team is taking a short sabbatical to refresh our processes, update our vision and begin again.

 

The Transformational Times was born during the first days of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, when the Medical College of Wisconsin (MCW) sent all of the students and many faculty and staff members home. As I have recounted before, we decided to transition our existing quarterly newsletter into a weekly offering, and rename it the Transformational Times. We hoped this would keep our work alive and support our medical education community.

 

As those early weeks turned into months then years, we kept up our pace, publishing 178 weekly issues of the Transformational Times and two curated books. We have taken only a handful of holiday weeks “off.” We are proud we have helped people share personal stories about their work and worlds. The tagline to be “delivering stories of hope, community, caring and resilience to our community,” has largely been honored.

 

The Transformational Times has been a success in many ways. We have grown our readership both inside and outside of MCW and received a great deal of supportive feedback and a few critical comments; we take all of our feedback very seriously. Through these efforts, we have hosted a hardy, broad conversation around the transformation of medical education and accelerated the expansive acceptance at MCW and beyond of new models for educating physicians that embody the character and caring essential to health and health care. This is the mission of the Kern Institute.

 

What to expect in the future

With the pandemic largely in the rear-view mirror, we are taking a break to reimagine the Transformational Times. Over the next few weeks, under the leadership of our new Co-Editors-in-Chief Wendy Peltier, MD and Himanshu Agrawal, MD, we will seek input from our readers. Our Editorial Board will ensure we continue to prioritize creating community and encouraging storytelling that promotes the ideas and discourse at the heart of health professions education.

 

Drs. Peltier and Agrawal will do this work along with our multidisciplinary editorial board which includes Bruce Campbell, MD (founding Editor-in-Chief); Kathlyn Fletcher, MD; Adina Kalet, MD, MPH; Karen Herzog (Milwaukee-based journalist); Justine Espisito, (Kern Institute staff); Joy Wick, (Kern Institute Communications Consultant); William Graft. Jr., MD (Resident, Internal Medicine/Psychiatry); and medical students Julia Bosco, Linda Nwumeh, Wolf Pulsiano, Sophie Voss and Emelyn Zaworski.

 

Our immediate goals are to work with Kern Institute members and the MCW leadership to:

• Refine our processes, policies, and submission guidelines
• Publish regular, theme-based issues that engage broad swaths of our community
• Leverage our Philosophies of Medical Education Transformation Lab (PMETaL) to build a civil discourse framework that enables diverse and profound conversations about our professions
• Have our editing team, including two former journalists, actively assist and encourage writers of all comfort levels
• Explore more flexible publishing platforms (video, audio, social formats, etc.)
• Integrate our work with the Kern Institute Podcast Network

 

We plan to continue and expand popular features of the Transformational Times, including:

• Themed issues for special days (e.g., Veteran’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving) and events in the medical education year (e.g., The White Coat Ceremony, Match Day, Graduation)
• Programmatic reports from the Institute, including The Learner Continuum Hub, Educator Development Hub, and the Medical Education Data Science, Human Centered Design, and the Philosophies of Medical Education Transformation labs
• Project reports from the Transformational Innovations (TI2), KINETIC3, and the MCWFusion curriculum, including Learning Communities, The Good Doctor Course, the Character and Professionalism Thread, and Learning Dashboards
• Works-in-progress on medical school to residency transitions, character measurement, and professional identity formation
• Summaries of Qualitative Research Methods, the Kern Institute Collaboration Scholarship (KICS) group journal clubs and collaborations, the Medical Education Matters Podcast, and our Medical Education Transformation book series
• Collaboration reports with Academic Affairs, the MCW Affiliated Hospitals (MCWAH) GME programs, MCW-Central Wisconsin, MCW-Green Bay, Thrive on King, the School of Pharmacy, the Physician Assistants Program, Genetic Counselling, Anesthesia Assistant Program, and the Graduate School
• Reflection on and coverage of the emerging issues of our times

Please Provide Input

While we won’t be publishing for a few weeks, we will be accepting submissions, and we encourage you to reach out to us with your ideas.

 

We want to hear from you! Whether this is your first or your 178th time reading the Transformational Times, please provide us feedback by taking our survey. If you have advice, opinions, or critiques, please reach out with your thoughts and feelings during this time. And thank you for reading, sharing, and caring.

 

In the meanwhile, watch this space for announcements of our Kern Institute events and related content.

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Sincerely,

Adina Kalet, MD MPH is the Director of the Robert D. and Patricia E. Kern Institute for the Transformation of Medical Education and holder of the Stephen and Shelagh Roell Endowed Chair at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Dr. Bill Henk on A New Resource for Aspiring Authors in the Kern Institute

 From the June 2, 2023 issue of the Transformational Times - KINETIC3

Three Questions for Dr. Bill Henk 

 

 

 

A New Resource for Aspiring Authors in the Kern Institute  

 

Writing for publication is a highly developed skill that typically requires years to master and can benefit from scholarly mentoring. Read about a longtime professional educator who is eager to share his knowledge about writing success honed over several decades as a faculty member and academic administrator in higher education…  

  

1. What is your role with the Kern Institute and what goals do you have for that work? 

 

My role with the Kern Institute primarily will be part-time writing consultant for members of the Medical Educator Research tracks that are part of KINETIC3.  In this position, I expect to draw upon my lengthy experience as a senior faculty member, department chair, school director, and dean in mentoring faculty members with aspirations to write for publication.  

 

Working in cooperation with Drs. Kristina Kaljo, Michael Braun, and Amy Farkas in the Kern Institute for Collaborative Scholarship (KICS), my goals are to provide informed advice in identifying a publishable idea, orchestrating the work with distinction, and most of all, rendering the resulting manuscripts in a compelling enough way to warrant publication in refereed forums.     

 

2. What is your background in academic writing and how did you come to do this kind of work?  

 

Many years ago, as a graduate student, a member of my doctoral committee encouraged me to submit the pilot study I had done for my dissertation to a top journal.  I thought he was delusional, because I had never done anything remotely like that before, and its rigorous standards were legendary.  But miraculously, the manuscript got accepted outright, and so did the next two thought pieces I submitted. I remember thinking, “How hard could this publishing gig be anyway?” And then the next five articles I wrote were summarily rejected.   

 

After graduating with my doctorate, I still somehow landed a plum position at the University of Georgia, a bona fide “publish or perish” institution. A number of major figures in my field were on the faculty there, and they regularly reminded me of the absolute necessity to place my research in refereed journals. Although they didn’t directly mentor me, they set an example for what it meant to be prolific, and I realized then that I had better figure out the publishing “game” on my own, and soon, or start looking for my next job!   

 

Through trial and error and untold hours of intense effort, I landed on a formula for publishing success that has served me well over the course of my career, largely at Penn State and later at Marquette University: 

 

A timely, relevant, and sufficiently unique topic, properly researched, professionally rendered, and submitted to an appropriate forum. 

 

Skillfully executing the formula is much easier said than done, and even then, there are no guarantees of success. In my experience, it’s the subpar rendering of manuscripts that most often prevents deserving science and exposition from getting into print. That’s where I believe I can help most.   

 

This belief is rooted in the considerable success I fortunately enjoyed as an author, which led to being invited to serve on key editorial review boards and then, to co-editing a journal. All these formative experiences abundantly highlighted the caliber of work necessary to publish manuscripts regularly enough to meet and exceed institutional promotion and tenure criteria.  

 

What do you enjoy about academic writing?  

 

Even though I’m no longer required to write professionally anymore, I still do, because I will never tire of having a paper accepted.  Truth be told, I do the “dance of joy” each and every time a manuscript makes the grade, because to my mind, no scholarly effort is more professionally affirming than having extremely demanding editors and reviewers embrace one’s work.  

 

But nowadays, helping others experience that same joy through their publishing success provides me with the most gratification. So, I am excited about the opportunities and challenges my new role presents and look forward to contributing to the scholarly productivity of Kern Institute associates as appropriate.    

 

 

William A. Henk, Ed.D, is a writing mentor for members of the KINETIC3 Medical Educator Research track in the Robert D. and Patricia E. Kern Institute for the Transformation of Medical Education.  He served as an assistant professor at the University of Georgia, and as a professor, department chair and school director at Penn State University and Southern Illinois University before being named Dean of the College of Education at Marquette University in 2004, a role he retained for over 16 years.