Breakfast of Champions: Alice Fornari, EdD - The Journey to Full Professor as a Non-MD Medical Educator

Alice Fornari, EdD, is Associate Dean of Educational Skills Development at Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine and Assistant Vice President of Faculty Development. Prior to joining Hofstra/North Shore-LIJ, Dr. Fornari was Assistant Director of Medical Education and Co-Chair of the Division of Education at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Dr. Fornari has funded scholarship which focuses on educational development and practice. We are fortunate to have Dr. Fornari's perspective in this month's BOC post.  

I always consider myself an educator. Yes, my passion is learning. Even in my prior career as a nutrition educator, I worked with students and professionals to effectively improve their teaching and learning. This is core to my current role at Hofstra-North Shore LIJ School of Medicine.

People ask me; “what do you do in your role?”

I say, “I teach people how to teach.”

Teaching is my passion. In my role as a medical educator in a large 18-hospital academic health system, I cover a wide spectrum of medical education: UGME, GME and CME. My goal is to ignite teaching as a passion for others in the medical education environment. I do my best to take “one-on-one” faculty development sessions and create “communities of practice” among like-minded people to work together to collaborate on ideas. My hope for program participants is for them to leave with new knowledge and skills that they can use and share with others.

One way to engage faculty in teaching and learning is to help them realize that one of the four paradigms of Boyer’s definition of scholarship is teaching and learning.

Exposing faculty to this concept allows them to use their everyday work as a medical educator as a bucket-filler for professional advancement and recognition.  When I partner with a clinician educator, I take some aspect of their clinical educator role and convert it to a research question, apply descriptive methodology, outcomes, and describe its application to educational practice. Yes, a research project!

So this partnership has a purpose for both the clinician educator and myself as a senior medical educator. We both build vitae based on educational research that crosses curriculum development, teaching, learning outcomes, and professional identify formation.  Making these creative ideas public allows for feedback from other like-minded professionals and for cross-fertilization of ideas across institutions.

This collaborative approach to education research has supported my success as a non-MD in a MD world. I learned early in my career as a medical educator that partnering with physicians and nurses not only leads to scholarship and  peer reviewed publications but has led to my successful promotion from assistant professor to associate professor and most recently full professor over an eleven year period.

Lastly, it is important to note that all of my educational scholarship is completed after hours, i.e. not in the workday.  Achieving publication and promotion is an out of workday activity.  Once this reality is no longer a barrier,  you will reap rewards, career promotion, and satisfaction.