Teaching
Delegating and tracking teaching assignments
Assessment design, clinical semiology, tutoring, ECOS (OSCE): share assignments among junior faculty, appoint leads, follow the annual cycle without chasing people from memory.
The problem
Part of medical school teaching relies on the clinical fellows and assistants (chefs de clinique, assistants): clinical semiology workshops, docimology (assessment design), tutoring, objective structured clinical examinations (ECOS, the French OSCE). The team changes every year, leads leave, and faculty deadlines land in a mailbox nobody monitors.
Figure. The teaching chain and its two anticipation rules.
Step-by-step method
- The teaching chain, written down once: lecture to prepare, lecture delivered and uploaded to the platform, questions, assessment review (docimology), exam, deliberation.
- A table of delegated assignments: domain, content of the assignment, faculty contact, last year’s lead, this year’s lead, status (appointed, to be appointed, to be renewed).
- Allocate when the team changes: workshop cycles, files per assistant, examiners.
- The annual cycle, month by month: tutor applications, start of workshops, first sessions, exams, deliberations, resits.
- Monitor faculty emails by contacts and keywords, on the mailbox that actually receives them; if a source is unavailable, report it rather than concluding “nothing new”.
- Cross-check with the department schedule: no assignment on an on-call shift, a post-call rest day or a clinical session.
- Update old materials: any material more than three years old is flagged and updated to the latest guidelines before the lecture.
Deliverable
A table of assignments and leads, an annual cycle, alerts at D-30 and D-15, and up-to-date materials.
Safeguards
Contact details stay in the working tool and are never published. Proposed dates only go into the calendar after approval.
Starter prompt
Here is the list of teaching assignments in my department and this year’s team of assistants. Build the table of assignments (content, outgoing lead, lead to be appointed), propose an allocation and the annual cycle month by month.