Nicole Shilkofski, MD MEd
- Vice Chair of Education, Department of Pediatrics
- Associate Professor of Pediatrics
Educator of the Month
May 2026: Nicole Shilkofski
Tip of the Month: Teach your residents and fellows to “talk out loud/think out loud” when they are both presenting and simultaneously teaching on inpatient rounds or in the ambulatory setting, particularly when students or junior trainees are present. This will help you assess their clinical reasoning process, but also encourages them to use “type 2 reasoning”, which is more deliberate, analytical and reflective and should be used when a clinical situation is less familiar or complex in order to narrow down a differential diagnosis. As educators, experienced clinicians frequently invoke “type 1 reasoning” automatically, which is typically faster and intuitive. But this type of reasoning depends on pattern recognition and is therefore heavily dependent on prior experiences of the clinician, which more novice learners will not have as a natural advantage. By role modeling the articulation of patterns that we ourselves recognize, we can use these patterns as a starting point, but not an endpoint, for teaching. Good clinicians use both types of reasoning to be efficient in their clinical decision making, but yet prevent diagnostic error. Educators should role model to trainees when to “trust the pattern” but also when to “slow down/verify”. This type of “metacognition” or “thinking about thinking” helps learners recognize when an intuitive answer is enough and when to pause and deliberate.
IEE Educator of Month: May 2026 Nicole Shilkofski, MD, MEd
April 2026, Akshata Hopkins
Tip of the Month: Teach the Person in Front of You - One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is to teach the person in front of you - not the curriculum, not the checklist, not the version of the learner you expected. Each learner brings a unique set of experiences, motivations, and needs. Taking a moment to understand what matters to them allows teaching to become more targeted, meaningful, and lasting.
IEE Educator of Month: April 2026 Akshata Hopkins, MD
Akshata Hopkins, MD
- Assistant Professor of Pediatrics
Primary Location: Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital, Saint Petersburg, FL
March 2026: Natasha Chida
Tip of the month: Have high expectations of your trainees, and build an environment that elevates them to meet those expectations. They will do it! This means expecting your trainees to know their patients inside and out; expecting them to take full ownership over their patients and over their learning; expecting them to spend time at the bedside; expecting them to do hard things; and expecting them to push themselves to the edge of their comfort zone in order to grow. Sometimes we worry as educators about being seen negatively if we have high expectations. But its our duty to both our trainees and patients to help them become the best they can be, and that involves helping them realize what the amazing things they are capable of!
IEE Educator of Month March 2026, Natasha Chida, MD, MSPH
Natasha Chida, MD MSPH
- Program Director, Osler Medical Residency
- Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine
February 2026: Ashley Paul
Tip of the Month: Pay attention to what feels missing in your training or teaching environment. Often, that gap is where meaningful innovation begins. For me, struggling as a learner and navigating imperfect feedback conversations led to a deep commitment to evidence-based teaching and feedback literacy. Bring learners into the process, invite multiple perspectives, and build community rather than working in silos. When we co-create with our students and colleagues, we not only improve medical education, but we also transform ourselves, those around us, and the broader educational landscape.
IEE Educator of Month February 2026, Ashley Mary Paul, MD, MEd
January 2026: Mariah Robertson
Tip of the Month: Effective, inclusive and collaborative clinician educators set aside the expectation that they must know everything. While content expertise matters, learning is often best supported when educators adopt the role of facilitator rather than sole authority. For me this shift required intentional perspective transformation from “expert who delivers” to “educator who creates conditions for learning.” By cultivating an environment that centers growth mindset and flattens hierarchy, educators invite bidirectional learning, honor the perspectives of all team members and model intellectual humility. Saying “let’s look that up together” not only normalizes uncertainty, but also reinforces curiosity, shared ownership of learning and the understanding that teaching is less about delivering answers and more about cultivating collective inquiry.
IEE Educator of Month January 2026, Mariah Robertson, MD, MPH
December 2025: Rachel Salas
Tip of the Month: You have to Play to Win: Apply for educational leadership positions, awards, grants
IEE Educator of Month December 2025, Rachel Salas, MD, MEd
November 2025: Kamna Balhara
Tip of the Month: Exploring innovative or non-traditional approaches in medical education can be valuable for learners and rewarding for educators. In museum-based education, the Visual Thinking Strategies framework asks participants, "What do you see that makes you say that?", and "What more can we find?" These questions are equally translatable to classroom and clinical settings - they encourage learners to explore their own thought processes and interrupt cognitive bias, while also encouraging them to keep an open mind and welcome interprofessional perspectives from colleagues, other health professions learners, and patients.
IEE Educator of Month November 2025, Kamna Balhara, MD
Kamna Balhara, MD
- Associate Program Director, Emergency Medicine Residency
- Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine
September 2025: Idris Leppla
Tip of the Month: Do things that come naturally to you. For example, it's harder for me to sit down and write a paper than it is for me to write a lecture with a lot of Q&A and interactive case discussion. Therefore, I seek out opportunities to teach. In short, do what you like and honor those who have taught you well.
IEE Educator of Month September 2025, Idris E. Leppla, MD
August 2025: Julia Shalen
Tip of the Month: As an educator, one of the most important tools you have are questions. Curious questions from you to your learners can spark new thought processes, create connections between concepts and open up new ways of thinking. Conversely, encouraging learners to ask questions of you, of the material, of their peers and of the system “why do we do the things we do”, “how could this be better or different”, “what is the reasoning behind this” etc… creates learning opportunities for all involved and can lead to new areas of inquiry, research and scholarship for both you and the learners.
IEE Educator of Month August 2025, Julia Shalen, MD
July 2025: David Cooke
Tip of the month: Allow your personality to be a part of your teaching. Especially in a small group setting, this allows the learner to form a more meaningful connection with you, which should allow them to recognize that they are in a safe space to learn by exploring what they don’t know yet.
IEE Educator of Month July 2025, David W. Cooke, MD
David W. Cooke, MD
- Director, Pediatric Endocrinology Fellowship Training Program
- Professor of Clinical Pediatrics
June 2025: Douglas Robinson
Tip of the Month: We as educators have the responsibility to support our students, help them through this critical growth phase of their development while helping develop their scholarship and academic success that will help them launch their independent careers. Mentorship and development of our students requires individuality and creativity as they pursue their advanced degree.
IEE Educator of Month June 2025, Douglas Robinson, MPhil, PhD
May 2025: John Woller
Tip of the Month: Ask for feedback from more experienced educators, ideally people you have personally learned from. Schedule a time when you will be teaching (whether in the classroom, at the bedside, or elsewhere) and ask them to attend and give structured feedback. Teaching is a skill; the best way to hone any skill is through deliberate practice based on expert feedback.
IEE Educator of Month May 2025, John Woller III, MD
John Woller, MD
- Associate Program Director for Clinical Reasoning for the Osler Medical Residency Training Program
- Assistant Professor of Medicine
April 2025: Ashwini Niranjan-Azadi
Tip of the month: Adult learning theory notes the importance of allowing learners to set self-directed goals. The use of SMART goals allows our learners to share their goals with us and also allows us to focus our feedback. Whether you are spending one hour or a one month with a learner, ask them to set a goal that is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely to enhance their learning experience. If a learner gives you a goal that does not meet this criteria, help them tailor the goal.
IEE Educator of Month: April 2025 Ashwini M. Niranjan-Azadi, MD
Ashwini Niranjan-Azadi, MD
- Faculty Development, Wellness, and Onboarding Director, Division of Hospital Medicine
- Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine
March 2025: Edward Kuwera
Tip of the Month: Tell a Story and Repeat It - In my experience, regardless of age or level of training, many people benefit from storytelling as a method of teaching and learning. So many of us enjoy books, movies, and video games in large part because of a well told story. It’s much easier to recall information that flows in a series of events, rather than rote memorization. When learning, try to incorporate the information in a way that forms a story – whether visual, audio, or whatever combination of senses works best with your memory. For me, a combination of audio and visual works well. Once you know the story – repeat it and continually add details as needed.
Let’s take an example: The story of congestive heart failure - instead of memorizing that liver cirrhosis is a complication of CHF, imagine a movie playing of the heart beating weakly, blood pooling, causing backflow as it increases pressure in the liver. You see the liver expand and mottle, gradually changing in appearance, scarring into a cirrhotic state. If you missed something in the story, it’s easy to fill in a detail – further backflow will go into the legs and you now see the skin discolor, turning into stasis dermatitis. This process can work even with complex information. Storytelling with repetition can be extremely useful and I highly encourage you try it if you haven’t already!
IEE Educator of the Month: March 2025
Edward Kuwera, MD
- Fellowship Program Director - Pediatric Ophthalmology & Adult Strabismus
- Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology
February 2025: Sharon Bord
Tip of the Month: On my first rotation in medical school a classmate and co-rotator said to our surgery attending, "We may be wearing blue scrubs, but we are really green." I had been so nervous about being in the OR that day, but when she said that it set the stage for our day and expectations from our faculty member. It allowed us all to take a deep sigh of relief and to get the most out of our learning environment.
It is important for us as educators to remember what it feels like to be at different stages of learning and to understand the stresses as well as triumphs that our learners are hoping to experience. I think we can all recall some of our first days on clinical rotations in medical school, or the first weeks of residency, and the nervous excitement that went along with it. By putting ourselves in the mindset of our learners we can best meet them where they are at in their learning journey and allow them to feel comfortable in taking risks and engaging with the team.
IEE Educator of Month: February 2025 Sharon Bord, MD
January 2025: Charlene Gamaldo
Tip of the Month: Remember that no 2 teaching experiences are ever the same, even if you are teaching the same material because your learners are different. With that in mind, strive to personalize the experience to the learning preference and the educational goals of your learner so they feel engaged and invested in the process. This partnership will increase the likelihood that the mutual goals of both educator and learner are achieved.
Charlene Gamaldo, MD
- Vice Chair, Faculty Development, Department of Neurology, Associate Vice Provost, Johns Hopkins University Provost’s Leadership, Advancement and Development (L.A.D.) Academy
- Professor of Neurology
2024
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Tip of the Month: Remember what it is like to be a novice. Cognitive load is high and might be difficult to navigate. My tip: Try learning something new, something challenging that forces you to remember the challenges of being a novice. Then, approach your novice learners with patient understanding rather than an expectation of instant mastery.
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Tips of the Month:
- Teach at the bedside. Your learners remember patient stories, and your applied medical knowledge to care for them.
- Let your learners know when creating a teaching moment. This triggers learning, and long-term retention of data and clinical practices.
- Be humble and willing to learn. You will learn much more from your patients and learners than you will teach them.
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Tip of the Month: I am following up on Tina Zhang’s tip of the month (May 2024) about creating a supportive learning environment. On a clinical rotation, begin by explicitly addressing the learning environment and creating a learning community (Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach). Put forth your ideas, invite input from other, set mutual expectations, then follow up. A few examples of how your behavior can contribute to building a supportive learning community: (1) acknowledge that we are all learners, with varying degrees of experience and expertise, who can learn from one another; (2) focus upon what is important for patient care, not what you know most about; (3) be humble: demonstrate not knowing something, regularly using resources (online, colleagues, consultants, etc.) to efficiently find, share, and evaluate possible answers. You will find others then doing the same, admitting not knowing something and feeling responsible for asking and finding the answer. You may be surprised how much these simple actions help make the learning environment safe, fun, and focused on identifying important unknowns that, when addressed, improve patient care. These actions will reveal and role model your expertise in making clinical decisions and delivering the best patient care.
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Tip of the Month: KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE: When speaking (and usually using a PowerPoint presentation) to a group whose first language is not English: Speak slowly without complicated sentences or unusual, highfalutin words. Give in your introduction a road map of the talk. Intersperse throughout the talk word slides that convey brief points to remember, e.g., “Clinical Pearl”, or “Remember:” or “Note”. At the end of your talk, use a conclusion slide, which contains up to five but no more, take home messages. Tell them what you want them to remember. One more on Know your audience, When teaching to a residents from another specialty, make sure some of your teaching is targeted to their interests. For example, if a resident from internal medicine is rotating on neurology and you find out their goal is to become a gastroenterologist, teach them the neurology of the GI tract, e.g. tabes, porphyria, lead poisoning, and mitochondrial and autoimmune diseases that affect both the brain and the GI tract.
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Tip of the Month: Think like a scientist. Be systematic in preparing for educational experiences. Gather data to assess learning objectives and evaluate your teaching. Every educational experience is an experiment, and you're always trying to learn from each one. Most importantly, science is about humility and testing assumptions. Avoid assumptions by asking learners what they know and/or how they're feeling, and be transparent to avoid incorrect assumptions about yourself. This can foster trust and a freedom to be vulnerable and make mistakes, which are key ingredients for learning.
Watch the video. -
Tip of the Month: Prioritize creating a supportive learning environment for your learners. This will be crucial to your success as an educator, whether you are teaching in the classroom or leading a team on the wards. With a positive learning environment, learners are more likely to engage in thoughtful reflection, ask questions, and embrace growth mindset thinking. Creating a safe space will allow learners to explore, struggle, reflect, and grow without fear of judgement. To do this, try to set clear and realistic expectations at the beginning, promote open communication, and provide frequent observation and formative feedback for learners.
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Tip of the Month: When attending on one of the teachings services, on morning rounds ask the presenting intern to present from memory, and ask another to pull up the H& P on a WOW. Tell the presenting intern that it is not a memory contest, just present as much as they remember and they can ask their fellow intern at the WOW as reference for any data they can’t remember.
The presenting interns almost always do a really good job; they remember all the important stuff, they leave out a lot of the extraneous information and the presentation ends up being more focused and concise. It also makes one of the other interns (the one at the WOW) actively involved in the presentation. -
Tip of the month: Meet your students where they are! Learn who they are, where they are headed, and what is hard for them. Ask questions that no one else is asking them. Listen before you teach. You’ll be an excellent teacher before you know it.
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Tip of the Month: One of the most powerful things you can do for a learner is tell them about your mistakes. Tell them about a time you failed. Tell them about a time when something went wrong, and a patient got hurt. If we, as educators and leaders, don’t tell them these stories, then when it happens to them, and it will happen to them at some point, they will think something is wrong with them. They will think they are not good enough to be a doctor. But if they hear our stories, then maybe they will come to us instead of quitting, and say, “Remember what you told me? It happened to me too.” And we can help them to avoid being a second victim, and to grow and learn, rather than shrivel and fold, from their mistake.
Watch the video.
Learn more about Dr. Wolpaw. -
Tip of the Month: Stories inspire. Consider taking the time to tell a story that illustrates the creativity or serendipity that led to a key discovery central to your lecture. Rather than distracting from the core material, a well-placed anecdote gives students a hook that helps them latch onto a key lesson. Years later, students tell me that these stories stick with them and have often piqued their interest in learning more.
Watch the video.
Learn more about Dr. Baraban.
2023
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Tip of the Month: When caring for patients with a chronic condition, have students ask about how the condition presented (even if it is not the focus of the encounter) and the path to diagnosis. It is in this way that they learn the "stories" that precede the diagnoses.
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Tip of the Month: Take a minute out of every day you are working with learners to give feedback. Small or large scale of the feedback matters less. Make the act of giving the feedback a habit that you do every day.
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