Journal of Advances in Medical Education & Professionalism

Abstract

Medical education is a new discipline whichstarted about 50 years ago. The pioneer of thisdiscipline was George Miller from the Universityof Chicago who suggested most of prominentmedical professionals have little or no knowledge ofpsychology of learning and advocated the validity ofpresent medical education in the world.He hypothesized that while very eminent and welltrained scientific oriented medical teachers were verywell qualified in their prospective field of medicine,they were not well aware, nor utilized the psychologyof learning. Therefore, their effort in training medicalstudents was partially wasted. He emphasized thegoal oriented learning and suggested that we, asacademic teachers of medical sciences, must switchour emphasis from teaching to learning. He alsoproposed that every teacher of medicine” clearingthe objective and every course in medicine” it wasthe further the fact that the objective should be in theform of “behavioral objective” and emphasized thatthis objective should be well spelled out and clearlydefined and written in advance.Fortunately, one of our academicians, Dr. BahmanJoorabchi, who was in Chicago gets in touch withDr. Miller and soon became the pioneer of medicaleducation after his return to Shiraz Medical School.In early 1970’s the Department of Medical Educationwas established in Shiraz Medical School. A numberof workshops were carried out by Dr. Joorabchifor professors of clinical and basic sciences. Also anumber of professors from different disciplines, fromboth clinical and basic sciences, were sent to Chicagoto get up-to-date in medical education. On return,they themselves became the instructor and facilitatorof these workshops.These workshops were so successful that soon entiremedical schools of Iran became interested and invitedthe Shiraz group to carry on these workshops all overthe country.The World Health Organization noted thegreat success of this department and soon Shirazbecame the World Health Organization Center formedical education for the entire region of EasternMediterranean.In early 2011, based on the demand of participantsof these workshops, we started planning a publication.We hope that all interested individuals as well asformer scholars of this department collaborate withus to achieve our mission. We are looking forward toall constructive suggestions and criticism. The youngand enthusiastic staff of this department are keen toreceive your correspondence and emails.