In this research project characteristics of effective instructional development were identified that are appealing to medical teachers and relevant for medical education. Furthermore, we wanted to... Show moreIn this research project characteristics of effective instructional development were identified that are appealing to medical teachers and relevant for medical education. Furthermore, we wanted to know if medical teachers__ learning improved if an instructional development program was adapted in such a way that it included more of these characteristics. In this project we conducted two studies. In the first study, described in Chapters 2 and 3, we focused on selecting characteristics of effective instructional development programs for the medical context. In this study teachers and teacher educators were asked to indicate which of 35 characteristics that had been derived from the literature on effective instructional development (Guskey, 2003; Steinert et al., 2006) were important to them. In the second study, on which we report in Chapters 4 and 5, we used the characteristics collected in the first study as a framework to analyze a successful instructional course called Train the Trainers. This provided insight into its effectiveness and impact. We constructed a new instructional development course, using the information from the framework, and studied the learning processes of the medical teachers who participated in this Plus Course Show less