Honoring Thyself in the Transition to Online Teaching

Increasingly, health professions education (HPE) faculty are choosing or being required to transition their face-to-face teaching to online teaching. For many faculty, the online learning environment may represent a new context with unfamiliar technology, changing expectations, and unknown challenges. In this context, faculty members may find themselves teaching in ways that are dissonant with the existing assumptions, beliefs, and views that are central to their pedagogical or teaching identity. This identity dissonance may lead to dissatisfaction and frustration for faculty members and potentially suboptimal learning experiences for students. In this Perspective, the authors propose that faculty consider using Pratt's five teaching perspectives as a conceptual framework to recognize and mitigate potential identity dissonance as they transition to teaching online. Derived and refined through several years of research, these teaching perspectives are based on interrelated sets of intentions and beliefs that give direction and justification to faculty members' actions. They have been used in higher education to improve faculty satisfaction, self-reflection capabilities, and faculty development. The authors, therefore, believe that these teaching perspectives hold the potential to help HPE faculty enhance their teaching and retain their primary teaching identify, even as they shift to online teaching. Doing so may ensure that the components of teaching they enjoy and draw self-efficacy from are still central to their teaching experience. Pratt's teaching perspectives also provide a conceptual framework for creating future faculty development initiatives and conducting research to better understand and improve the experience of transitioning to online teaching.