My Year on the AEM Education & Training Editorial Board

By Danielle T. Miller, MD, 2020-2021 AEM E&T Fellow Editor in Training

When reflecting on this past year as the Academic Emergency Medicine Education & Training (AEM E&T) Fellow Editor in Training, this experience has highlighted three important topic areas: the benefit and need for longitudinal mentorship in the peer review process, the skill of turning meaningful education projects into education scholarship, and the effectiveness of collaborating with experts on journal initiatives.

First, the cornerstone of this fellowship is to learn to be a better peer reviewer. While mentorship and coaching have been shown to be integral to trainee clinical and career advancement, these models have rarely been implemented in peer review. Peer review, like any clinical or professional skill, is a skill that must be developed through practice and targeted feedback — similar to Anders Ericsson’s concept of deliberate practice — in order to achieve mastery. Additionally, this mentorship model must be longitudinal, as the few studies on developing peer review skills have shown no effect in improving quality of reviews when mentorship is limited. Other fields in science have started to develop longitudinal “co-reviewing” models for mentoring in peer review of post-doctoral students. This longitudinal peer review mentorship model has been successfully implemented by AEM E&T in this editor-in-training position, and I want to specifically thank Dr. Esther Chen,

University of California San Francisco, who has created the framework for this mentorship and provided hours of focused feedback on my peer reviews throughout the year in order to help me improve my peer review skills. This year has also allowed me to develop the skill of turning small, meaningful education projects into education scholarship. For example, during an early goal exploration discussion with my journal mentor, I discussed my interest in resident education, including leading a recent workshop on recognizing and managing microaggressions in the clinical environment. Just a few weeks into this fellowship I learned that there was a gap in the emergency medicine literature on training providers on how to manage microaggressions and that the journal was thinking about publishing a special issue on dismantling racism in the next generation of learners. I was able to turn my educational session into a commentary which will appear in an upcoming AEM E&T special issue and collaborate on a multiinstitutional workshop that was presented at the 2021 Society for Academic Emergency Medicine annual meeting on how to support trainees in managing microaggressions. Being on the editorial board helped me to better understand the role of educational journals in shaping the conversation of education scholarship.

Finally, through this fellowship position, I had the opportunity to collaborate with content experts on a journal initiative to educate its readers on education research methodology. This experience in creating an “educational primer” for specific educational methods has enabled me to develop the skill in learning to create scholarship that is beneficial to journal readers and relationships with colleagues with similar educational interest outside of emergency medicine.

Overall, the experience provided by the AEM E&T Fellow Editor in Training program offered insight into the critical need for longitudinal mentors and coaches in peer review, fostered the skills in turning small, meaningful education projects into meaningful education scholarship, and inspired me to continue to collaborate with experts to shape and define the conversation surrounding medical education scholarship.

For more information on the AEM Education and Training Fellow Editor in Training program, contact the director of the program, Dr. Esther Chen, at manneporte@gmail.com.

“This experience in creating an ‘educational primer’ for specific educational methods has enabled me to develop the skill in learning to create scholarship that is beneficial to journal readers and relationships with colleagues with similar educational interest outside of

emergency medicine.”

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Dr. Miller is a medical education scholarship fellow in the department of emergency medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine. @DTMILLERMD