Back to school to teach: The Transitional Learning Processes of New Medical Educators in Malaysia and the United Kingdom

New medical educators (NMEs) receive less attention in research about transition compared to medical students and junior doctors. While medical students and junior doctors are assumed to be lacking in experience and more prone to making mistakes during transition, NMEs are assumed to be competent doctors because they have accumulated several years of clinical practice experience. The transition of NMEs from clinical practice into a formal teaching role, however, is not straightforward. The aim of this study was to explore doctors’ perceptions of how they negotiated their experience of learning in their transition to the role of medical educator and to study the implications of transitional learning processes for the management of NMEs’ teaching and learning needs, including what factors influenced their learning processes. In this comparative longitudinal qualitative research conducted in Malaysia and the United Kingdom, NMEs were interviewed three times over one year about how they learn how to teach, what they learned during the transition phase and what factors affected their learning processes. The NMEs were found to be developing competencies in three domains; teaching, clinical practice and research. NMEs were teaching medical students without knowing the best way to carry out their teaching roles and responsibilities, and were mostly relying on past experience of learning in medical schools. Factors which supported or hindered the learning processes of the NMEs have been identified and it was found that some of these factors were localised to each country’s context. Interestingly, the same factors could be experienced as either supportive or a hindrance to the learning of NMEs in different contexts. In explaining the learning processes of the NMEs in the workplace, it was found that the theory of Transformative Learning was more useful than the theory of a Community of Practice. The findings from this study have several implications for medical education systems in both countries. It is important that medical education providers acknowledge how NMEs navigate their transition into academia and identify what factors supported their learning, as easing the transition of NMEs into academia had the potential of developing them into excellent medical educators.