From What We Are Doing to Why: Describing RIME’s Core Values

Major life events afford opportunities to reflect on what matters. For the Research in Medical Education (RIME) Program Planning Committee, the events of 2020 and 2021 have been both celebratory and tragic. RIME turned 60 in 2021, which provided an opportunity to celebrate its longstanding commitment to promoting rigorous research and supporting the professional development of medical education scholars. 1 This celebratory milestone was tempered, however, by coincident cascading tragedies related to COVID-19, systemic racism, and social unrest. This combination of events prompted questions such as, How should RIME proceed in a pandemic? and How can RIME contribute to a more equitable future? 2–5 Grappling with these important issues also revealed deeper, underlying questions about values and purpose. What is most important about RIME? What is it about RIME that truly matters? The Foreword to the RIME supplement, of which this piece is an example, has historically served 3 purposes, at least before 2010. 6 First, it sometimes functioned as a space to explicitly acknowledge the community for the work that makes the RIME program possible—those who submit RIME papers, those who review RIME papers, members of the RIME Program Planning committee, and staff of the AAMC. So to all those who submit, review, adjudicate, and otherwise join in the work necessary to produce the RIME Supplement—a very public, “Thank you.” Second, the RIME Foreword sometimes functioned as a map to the RIME program by identifying overarching themes, topics, or emerging research areas and approaches. This task has been addressed by our newest RIME members in the RIME Overview. 7 In the Overview, the authors draw attention to the critical perspectives at play within the RIME supplement this year—whether describing where and how the authors of RIME papers approached their work from a critical perspective, or identifying areas for future critical work based on the foundational work included in the RIME Supplement. 7 Third, the RIME Foreword sometimes functioned as a public record—a space for accountability to our community and transparency of our processes. A key example of this has drawn attention to areas of research and methodologies that need more focus from the research community (e.g., Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion scholarship), to contemporary issues related to medical education (e.g., Critical Race Theory) and ongoing innovations in the field (e.g., epistemological approaches to educational research and the impact of those approaches). 3 This Foreword reminds us that historical practices need to be reconsidered and potentially restructured as our community grows and matures. This year, building on these examples, we (the authors) lean into this third purpose of using this Foreword as a space for accountability and transparency. Here, we describe a data-informed effort to illuminate and articulate RIME’s core values. For the purposes of this piece, we define core values as deeply ingrained beliefs and ideals that guide an organization’s actions. 8,9 Core values are the heart and soul of an organization made visible through its activities and decisions. Though they may not be explicitly stated in formal documents (e.g., policy statements, action plans), core values motivate, animate, and direct an organization’s principles and practices. 8 The direction or expression of core values may shift over time, but the values themselves typically do not. First and foremost, RIME has been a venue for disseminating research and scholarship in medical education. In 1962, the Director of the Division of Research on Medical Education at Case Western Reserve, wrote to the Chairman of AAMC and proposed time during the annual meeting for those doing research in medical education to share their work: “The objective is to bring before our colleagues in the AAMC the best in research in education and methods of evaluation by persons actually doing the bench research.” 10(p3) This marked the first time RIME had a place within the AAMC Annual Meeting, with the express focus of sharing education research and scholarship. It established RIME as a venue when there were few, if any, other venues available for scholars in medical education to share their work with others and to network with like-minded scholars. Over the years, RIME has consistently been identified as a venue for presenting high-quality research in medical education. For example, one former chair of RIME wrote, “As a committee, we affirmed our commitment to an annual meeting that met four main goals. The meeting was an opportunity for researchers to present relevant, high quality research. The presentations were to highlight what was innovative and to clarify new directions in medical education research. Those attending the conference should have the opportunity to network, hopefully, to form collaborations for future research.” 11(psi) However, time has not stood still. RIME is now one of many venues focused on medical education research. It shares this space with many other outstanding conferences, journals, and professional organizations. The specific roles of the RIME Program Planning Committee and the content of the program it assembles has evolved over time. For example, RIME papers were, at one time, part of a regular issue of Academic Medicine. Now they are published in an online-only supplement to Academic Medicine. RIME activities have also adapted and expanded. In 2020 and 2021, we shifted (along with the broader medical education community) to virtual meetings and conferences and types and foci of research necessitated by the COVID pandemic. Then, in January 2022, RIME welcomed its inaugural group of RIME mentees. 12 On the one hand, this evolution of the RIME program signals we are a healthy and responsive organization. On the other hand, these myriad changes have required repeated pivots and adjustments. Reiterating what we shared in the opening, these pivots have challenged us to reflect on why we’ve been doing things, not just how we’ve been doing them. For example, RIME has traditionally had discussants for the paper sessions, but how does that best happen in a virtual conference? More importantly, why does RIME have discussants? These types of questions led us, as current, previous, and incoming RIME (co)chairs, to explore and document the core values underpinning RIME’s work. In other words, when all else is shifting, what it is about RIME that remains stable? Most simply, what about RIME truly matters? Using principles-focused evaluation as a framework, 13 we examined existing documents and looked for patterns in the values expressed, the norms affirmed, and the issues raised that could affect how we explicated RIME’s core values. We reviewed RIME Forewords published between 2000 and 2020, the RIME Silver Anniversary Report, 10 former RIME member responses to the 60th anniversary survey, 1 the RIME Medical Education Scholarship, Research and Evaluation (MESRE) website, 14 and an AM Last Page describing the work of the RIME Program Planning committee. 15 To help us understand the organizational context, we interviewed 4 key stakeholders and included notes from those interviews in our review of documents. Taking a qualitative approach to scrutinizing these documents, D.F.B. created an initial set of codes based on statements from the RIME forewords that made declarative statements about the purpose or intention of RIME. She attached codes to segments of data from each of the documents and clustered codes (and coded data) into 3 overarching values: Excellence, Connection, and Growth. For example, the code “standard setting” mapped to the core value of Excellence. The code “forum” mapped to the core value of Connection. D.F.B. shared her codes with M.E.Y., who independently clustered codes into core values. M.E.Y.’s clustering aligned well with D.F.B.’s, and they considered this a reasonable draft of core values to move forward. D.F.B. and M.E.Y. then met with a RIME stakeholder (Boyd F. Richards) who had experience with principles-focused evaluation. He critiqued their analysis, helped them distinguish between core values and principles, and recommended mapping RIME practices and principles to the underlying core values. For example, RIME’s practice of having New Investigator and Trainee Awards maps to its principle of building capacity in health professions education research, which in turn maps back to its core value of Growth. This mapping exercise gave form to the values and reflected the visions offered by former RIME chairs (e.g., to strengthen collaborations with formal advanced master’s and PhD programs, create formal mentorship channels for junior and minority faculty, promote research related to knowledge translation). 1 To ensure the core values resonated with current RIME Committee membership, D.F.B. and M.E.Y. presented the core values, principles, and associated practices to the members of the RIME Program Planning Committee and key stakeholders interviewed earlier in the process and solicited feedback. D.F.B. and M.E.Y. revised the principles and practices to reflect feedback from these groups. Changes included articulating current practices directed toward supporting and promoting social justice-related research. We mapped this practice of offering an Under-represented in Medicine Research Award back to the principle of building capacity in race and social justice–related research, which was in keeping our core value of Growth. Table 1 lists RIME’s core values and illustrates how they align with specific principles and are enacted via RIME practices. Simply stated, Table 1 answers the question, “What is it about RIME that truly matters?” and documents how these core values manifest in our principles and practices. In brief, RIME appears to hold the values of Excellence, Connection, and Growth, and these are visible through a series of principles and operationalized through a variety of different practices. Research in Medical Education (RIME) Core Values, Principles, and Current Practices We, as current, immediate past, and incoming RIME (co)chairs, fully acknowledge that we are standing on the shoulders of giants. We did not endeavor to create core values, but rather to name core values that were already implicit in our history and ongoing work. Our goal in doing so was to make these core values explicit and show how they have shaped RIME Program Planning Committee activities and self-descriptions over the years. Based on this systematic, data-derived approach, we suggest that what matters to―and about―RIME is Excellence, Connection, and Growth. Articulating RIME core values serves many purposes. Making these values explicit will enable the RIME community to examine them more deliberately, purposefully, and critically when needed. We have also started using the values to guide the work of the RIME Program Planning Committee. We reviewed the core values at the start of the 2022 RIME Program Planning meeting and referred to them when decisions had to be made or problems needed to be solved. For example, we discussed how best to uphold our core values when deciding whether each RIME session would include a discussant. We eventually decided to include a discussant only for the RIME review paper sessions in 2022 because of their potential to engender high-level discussion around critical topics in health professions education (therefore supporting the core values of Connection and Excellence). In summary, the explicit core values of Excellence, Connection, and Growth are rooted in RIME’s past, guiding RIME’s present activities, and oriented toward RIME’s future. As we move from pandemic to endemic and beyond, our RIME successors will undoubtedly face new challenges, move in new directions, and experiment with new principles and practices. Despite anticipated changes and shifts, these explicit core values provide a rich, enduring heritage in which to ground their future endeavors. The authors acknowledge Boyd F. Richards, PhD, for his integral role in drafting the core values and reviewing early versions of the manuscript.

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