title: Transforming teaching into scholarship.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Traditionally, scholarship has been defined very narrowly as the number of one's publications and grant awards. Recently this definition has broadened to include dissemination of knowledge, experience or a tangible product shared with the educational community.
  
  
  BACKGROUND
  In an effort to enhance our own educational development, in 2005 we formed a 'community of practice' centred on teaching. The group was formed to share ideas, to reflect on teaching experiences and to transmit new knowledge to other clinician-educators within our paediatrics department.
  
  
  METHODS
  By examining what we do as clinicians and teachers, we were able to gather information about how we teach and how our students learn. As we reflected on this information within our small learning community, we began to realise the value of other people's input as a great source of learning. One of our first activities as a community was to develop a series of conferences on clinical teaching. We also asked ourselves how we could transform what we were doing into educational scholarship. It occurred to us that the conference topics could be the chapters of a book. Therefore, we chose to create a handbook that was a 'learning journal' on teaching.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  We transformed the initial list of conference topics to scholarship by using a three-phase model for transforming teaching into scholarship. Using this framework, we have demonstrated how clinician-educators can transform teaching activities into scholarship, and how important a community of practice can be for professional development.
authors.affiliation: Department of Pediatrics, Baylor College of Medicine, Texas Children's Hospital, Houston, Texas 77030, USA. tturner@bcm.tmc.edu
authors.forename: Teri
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Turner
authors.forename: Debra
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Palazzi
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Ward
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Lorin
mesh_terms: D004501:Education, Medical / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006801:Humans; D008505:Medical Staff, Hospital / Q000193:education; D013663:Teaching / Q000458:organization & administration*; D013664:Teaching Materials