For 35 years, the ACEP/Council of Emergency Medicine Residency Directors (CORD) Teaching Fellowship (TF) has been the launchpad for emergency physicians who teach, lead, and inspire. What began as a pioneering effort to train the first generation of emergency medicine educators has grown into a nationally recognized program that shapes the trajectory of academic careers.

With hundreds of alumni now serving as program directors, department chairs, national leaders, and innovators in medical education, the Fellowship’s legacy is woven into the fabric of emergency medicine.

Teaching How to Teach

“The most valuable thing I learned at the TF was an organized approach to developing curricula, and it got me started with an interest in learning how to be a better public speaker,” said Amal Mattu, MD, vice chair of academic affairs, University of Maryland in Baltimore, TF class of 1997. The TF was started in 1989 by Michael Gallery, who holds a PhD in human performance improvement, and was, at the time, the ACEP director of policy and executive director of the Emergency Medicine Foundation. He identified a gap in the needs of emergency medicine educators at the time. As an Advanced Cardiovascular Life Support and Advanced Trauma Life Support national educator, he noticed that physicians are often not taught how to teach. At the time, physicians primarily learned through observation and, often, through receipt of poorly delivered or punitive feedback. He created the TF in collaboration with emergency physicians at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas to help teach physicians to be effective educators. It started as a group of 20-25 physicians who met for two weeks in the fall and two weeks in the spring, completing a project between the phases.