The MEU is the educational entity that conducts programs for undergraduate, postgraduate, residents and faculty members at UCMS [6]. A three day orientation course (workshop) for senior residents was designed by MEU, UCMS and was named Senior Resident Training on Educational Principles (STEP). The objectives of STEP was to provide the residents a repertoire of pedagogical practices from which to plan, implement and evaluate their own teaching to engage students in the learning process, to demonstrate competence and skill in understanding and using a range of assessment methods, to give feedback in an appropriate manner and to employ goal-seeking behavior and team-work in medical education, and as life skills.

The assessment needs of participants were performed by verbal feedback from focus groups and performance review. Program director (coordinator of medical education unit) and program coordinator (author) led the dual moderator focus group. Verbal feedbacks were recorded by later and transformed into written statements by frequent group meetings while preparation of the blueprint. A questionnaire survey is a better tool for performing needs assessment and we consider its lack as our limitation. The principles of adult learning were followed and voluntary residents were asked to register online. To facilitate better group interaction only twenty participants on first-cum-first basis were registered for STEP. The participants were residents from physiology, biochemistry, pediatrics, surgery, pharmacology, pathology, dermatology, forensic medicine, anesthesiology and ophthalmology. The course content and methodology adopted for STEP is given in Table 1. The three day course content was largely modified as per rankings given to themes to be used in a resident-as-teacher educational intervention having largest sample size reported till date [4].

Transfer of training model was deliberately employed to give chance to the earlier trained faculty at our institute to empower their skills in conjunction with experienced MEU core members to create a receptive environment for learning and evolving [7, 8].

Pre and post tests are at best a measure of short term memory. More often than not they assess factual knowledge change and as such were not used in STEP. Rather than focusing on output, stress was given on outcome and the only evaluation instrument collected at the end of the workshop was written program feedback.

We did not used pre- and post-intervention outcome comparison method which may be considered by some as a limitation, as it only evaluates short-term memory. Sampling included residents from our own institute but as we are not aware of any other published work from India so it should be considered as an encouraging beginning with much scope for flexibility. Although resident self-confidence is important, self-assessment may not represent actual skills obtained and we consider it as a limitation.

The literature suggests that lasting effects of interventions to improve teaching are associated with opportunities for follow-up in the teacher’s own setting [20]. To address this need, the approaches proposed are to assign each resident a teaching mentor [9] and to assign them as facilitators in next resident workshop.

Senior residents in India are not given adequate training to choose appropriate methodology for their future career progression. However catching them young can give them a sound foundation for honing their skills as a future faculty. Pedagogical competence is unlikely to be achieved by a single course and the need for reiteration in the form of repeated practice, feedback and self-reflection is imperative. Research also is needed to assess the lasting effect of resident teaching courses and the impact of brief follow-up sessions to reinforce skills.