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Learning Continues between Meetings… Highlight - Fall to Spring: SEA Events and Activities

Multiple events and workshops occurred between the SEA Fall and Spring meetings. SEA members were able to engage in high quality educational activities and collaborative opportunities that focus on their career development as anesthesiologists and educators. Some of the activities hosted by SEA include:

Research Corner –

NEW to the SEA Newsletter is a section called – “Hot – Off – the Press”. Thanks to the Research Committee and the Co-Editors-in-Chief of JEPM (Journal of Education in Perioperative Medicine), for taking the lead on this effort. We highlight 1-2 papers in each Newsletter that every educator should know to enhance their teaching, administrative, or evaluative skills – knowledge you need in your Toolbox.

We kick off Hot-Off-the Press with these two articles...

Committee Updates

Learn of the exciting things going on at the grassroots level in your respective Committees and for those without a home – please JOIN one of our committees to contribute to the rapidly evolving landscape in Anesthesia Education.

Recap of the SEA Fall Meeting 2025
From Novice to Expert: Cultivating Excellence in Anesthesia Training
November 6, 2025 | Chicago, Illinois

In my fall newsletter, I described our "21st Century Flexner Moment," in which artificial intelligence (AI) is forcing us to reimagine medical education by doubling down on uniquely human skills like complex decision-making, ethical reasoning, and empathetic communication. As AI masters data and pattern recognition, our core value will increasingly be found in our ability to lead, collaborate, and connect. But this raises a critical question: can we cultivate these essential human skills in clinical learning environments that are too often compromised by incivility and psychological distress?

While we champion better teamwork and communication, our workplaces are frequently fraught with behaviors that undermine them. Research demonstrates that healthcare teams exposed to just “mild rudeness” show significant declines in diagnostic performance, procedural skills, and team collaboration. A 2023 review by Lewis found that incivility is directly associated with increased stress, declines in team performance, compromised patient safety, and poor quality of care, with junior staff more affected (1). In simulated anesthesia crises, residents exposed to incivility performed dramatically worse on critical management steps, with only 64% of the "rude environment" group performing at expected levels compared to 91% of controls (2).  Cooper et al. reported that patients of surgeons with higher numbers of unprofessional behavior reports faced a 14% increase in complications (3). In the ASA Monitor, Swerdlow and colleagues identify harassment, incivility, and disrespect as the primary drivers of burnout, with anesthesiologists reporting the highest intent to leave academic practice compared to other specialties (4).

Updates:

Over the past several months, the Precision Education (PE) Task Force, co-chaired by Larry Chu, MD and Viji Kurup, MD, has continued to advance several initiatives aimed at supporting innovation, collaboration, and data-informed training in anesthesiology education.

Standards and Data Infrastructure. The Standards Working Group has met regularly and, with leadership from Larry Chu, MD and Marianne Chen, MD, has developed a working prototype of a Program Director Precision Educator Dashboard. This prototype is being developed as part of the Task Force’s open-source Tequity in Anesthesiology Precision Education initiative. The group is also launching a Delphi process to define a basic shared, non-assessment common data set to support a pilot Federated Outcomes in Precision Education collaboration across programs. In parallel, the Assessment Working Group, led by Kenji Tanabe, MD, is initiating a Delphi process to identify a core set of Entrustable Professional Activities (EPAs) that could be federated within the Tequity pilot.

Generative AI for Teaching. The professional development working group led by Aileen Adriano, MD, with contributions from Erin Toaz, MD, Ngugi Kinyungu, MD, and colleagues is developing a practical, cross-platform “master prompt” framework to support point-of-care teaching with generative AI. The group has moved into beta testing, with members using different platforms (ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude) to generate teaching materials on a shared clinical topic – management of local anesthetic systemic toxicity – to compare outputs and refine a faculty-ready resource.

AI Education. The AI Working Group, led by Alex Goodell, MD, is developing an online course to help residents and faculty understand the emerging role of artificial intelligence in anesthesiology.

Educational Outreach. The Task Force continues to share its work through multiple channels. Four episodes of The Precision Educator podcast have been released to date (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQcPkjS7dsrmPn6U19xm7u7_X3-etcTEc). In December, the group hosted a workshop for SEA members on using conversational AI tools to support precision coaching in medical education.

Together, these efforts reflect the Precision Education Task Force’s focus on building practical tools, shared standards, and educational resources to advance precision education across anesthesiology training programs.

Any SEA members interested in joining this effort are requested to contact [email protected] or [email protected] . We are an inclusive and supportive group seeking to find answers together to problems facing educators and trainees in anesthesia.

Group Coaching in Academic Anesthesiology: Extending the Conversation to Faculty

By Aileen Adriano, MD and Karen Souter, MB BS FRCA MACM PCC CMC

Coaching began to take on new significance in medicine with the shift toward competency-based education in the early 2000s. This shift made clear what many educators already understood: learners progress at different rates and along individualized pathways. Traditional models of mentorship and advising, while valuable, may not always address these differences. Coaching emerged as a structured, learner-centered approach that emphasizes reflection, goal setting, and growth—making it a natural fit for modern medical education.

SEA 2025 Spring Meeting Recap: Doing More with Less, Together

April 4–6, 2025 | AT&T Hotel & Conference Center | Austin, Texas
The 2025 SEA Spring Meeting in Austin, Texas was a vibrant gathering of anesthesia educators from across the country. Centered around the timely theme “Doing More with Less in Medical Education,” this year’s meeting focused on how we, as educators, can continue to create meaningful learning experiences—even in the face of increasing demands and limited resources. From the opening remarks to the final workshops, the weekend was packed with practical strategies, engaging discussions, and a strong sense of community.

Program co-chairs Dr. Michael Hofkamp and Dr. Tina Tran curated a thoughtful and relevant agenda that addressed the real-world challenges we all face in academic medicine. Attendees explored innovative ways to maximize learner engagement, build effective leadership teams, and design curricula that are both impactful and sustainable. Conversations around educator wellness, peer coaching, and promotion pathways added further depth to the weekend, ensuring there was something valuable for everyone—regardless of experience level or institution type.

NEW to the SEA Newsletter is a section highlighting COMMITTEE UPDATES. We highlight 13 Committees in this Fall Newsletter. Our goal is to increase awareness among our new and existing members and incite the desire to JOIN one of these Committees to contribute to the rapidly evolving landscape in Anesthesia Education.

21st Century Flexner Moment: Charting our Course through Medicine's AI Revolution

Walking through the AMA ChangeMedEd 2025 meeting, I felt the familiar tug of a Flexner moment. So much of the agenda, workshops, and posters leaned into AI as a force reshaping how we teach, assess, and practice. The message was unmistakable: if AI is now better at facts, pattern recognition, and organizing knowledge, then the uniquely human work of medicine must come into sharper focus.

The most promising future isn't one where AI replaces physicians, but where human-AI collaboration outperforms either working alone. This "human-in-the-loop" approach ensures quality and safety while leveraging AI's analytical power alongside human expertise, empathy, and ethical reasoning. In anesthesiology, this might mean AI systems continuously monitoring patient status and alerting us of subtle changes, while we focus on complex decision-making, patient communication, and leading the perioperative team. AI could handle routine documentation and administrative tasks, which are major sources of physician burnout, freeing us to focus on the aspects of care that require human judgment and connection.

The fall meeting of the Society for Education (SEA) in Anesthesiology in Chicago, IL on November 7^th, 2024 was titled “The Year of the Educator.” The theme was chosen to highlight the need for and support of development and growth of members as educators.  The SEA fall meeting took place the day before the Society of Academic Associations of Anesthesiology & Perioperative Medicine to allow residency and fellowship program leadership the opportunity to extend and expand their learning at both meetings. 

The meeting opened with breakfast roundtable committee meetings. This time to network and meet other educators is a highlight of every SEA meeting, with committees being open to any interested new members. This year, the start time was slightly delayed to 8 AM to accommodate those who arrived in Chicago late the evening prior and those from western time zones. Please let us know if you liked that change!

An Interview with Dr. Michael P. Hofkamp, M.D.
Associate Professor of Anesthesiology and Obstetrics & Gynecology
Baylor College of Medicine

https://www.asahq.org/about-asa/newsroom/news-releases/2024/10/sexual-harassment-in-academic-medicine

We were astonished by the findings in the AAMC's "State of Women in Academic Medicine 2023-2024" report, that put forward the progress and persistent challenges in gender equity, particularly in our specialty. We commend our national societies who support women leaders in succeeding in their academic trajectory. The AAMC report shows the increase in the percentage of women chairs in academic anesthesiology departments from 13% in 2004 to 18% in 2024. We also recognize the narrowing of the compensation gap with women earning $0.94 for every dollar earned by their male colleagues. However, neither of these accomplishments are sufficient, and we must strive to break the “glass ceiling” and support gender equity at all levels.

For those looking for a fresh take on the murder mystery fiction genre, you can do no wrong picking up Australian author Benjamin Stevenson’s Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect. The second book in the Ernest Cunningham series finds murder mystery writer Ernest Cunningham invited to attend a mystery writer’s festival taking place entirely during a long haul train ride across the Austrailian desert. The odd man out among more established murder mystery authors, Ernest is faced with pressure from needing to follow up his one (and only) successful whodunit novel. That story just so happened to be more of a recounting of events of a murder he stumbled upon (the subject of Ernest Cunningham book #1 – Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone). His publisher suggests the cure for his writers block is attending the event, but without the advantage of real life event to spark his penmanship, he finds himself thinking how much easier it would be if tragedy struck the train. What are the odds it happens again…

Stevenson blends the fictional world of Ernest with the practical aspects of how to write a successful and gripping murder mystery. Frequently referencing S. S. Van Dine’s Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories (first published in 1928), Stevenson offers a playful recounting of the events of the 50^th anniversary Australian Mystery Writers Festival. Included in the fictionalized memoir are the rules for mystery fiction including nothing supernatural, murderer must be a major enough character to impact the plot, etc. A clever and refreshing take on the genre, Everyone On This Train Is A Suspect will be hard to put down for both seasoned veteran mystery readers and neophytes alike. You need not start at the first book in the series and can read this as a standalone, though there are reference to the prior novel. Love, forensics, logic, and storytelling are all a part of Ernest’s world. The question is not whether you should pick it up, but rather can you solve the mystery before Ernest does?

This will be my final contribution to the SEA newsletter as President. It provides me with the opportunity to reflect on what we have accomplished in the last two years and where we are going in the future. We emerged from COVID hungry for contact and renewed academic vigor, even as we struggled with less time and money allocated for educational endeavors. As a society, we have worked hard to provide our members with enhanced mentoring, resources and support. We continue to work together to address the issues we all face and develop creative solutions to our problems. I am proud of our demonstration of resilience and enthusiastic attack on problems that others have resigned themselves to.

We have shined in our integration of research and technology into education. Our mentoring network for research is robust and successful. We share ideas on how to apply the latest tools to conduct research and facilitate teaching and learning. It has been a great joy for me personally to reconnect with former trainees and partners through SEA designed programs to help them navigate their research and careers. 

Dr. Lauren Buhl

Dr. Dante Cerza

The 2024 Spring Meeting of the Society for Education in Anesthesiology (SEA) in Philadelphia, April 19-21, was designed to bring together top minds in Education, Anesthesiology, and Cognitive Psychology, and thanks to a cadre of dynamic keynote speakers and the perennial willingness of SEA members to try something new, we think it was an overwhelming success. The theme “The Science of Learning” was chosen to shine a light on the basic and applied research in Cognitive Psychology and Neuroscience that underlies so many of our practical approaches to teaching and learning but is not always readily accessible to clinical educators. By bringing this work into the clinical realm through our SEA members, we hope it will inspire new practical approaches to teaching and learning and new avenues for anesthesia education research grounded in basic science.

Dr. Cynthia Nebel opened the meeting on Friday morning with her talk entitled “Effective Learning Strategies for Planning and Reinforcement of Learning” and returned in the afternoon for a follow-up talk, “Strategies for Development of Understanding.” She emphasized that effective learning doesn’t just happen but requires planning, and she introduced the concepts of spacing and interleaving. She also laid out strategies such as elaborative interrogation, concrete examples, and dual coding to help learners develop understanding, and discussed ways to apply retrieval practice to reinforce learning. For anyone who missed her talks or wants a refresher, learningscientists.org is a treasure trove of content from Dr. Nebel and her colleagues on these topics and many more. 

The Society for Education in Anesthesia (SEA) Well-Being Committee: Fostering Resilience and Building Connections

The Society for Education in Anesthesia (SEA) has recently established a Well-Being Committee. Historically, the work of this committee was housed under the American Society of Anesthesiologists’ (ASA) Committee on Physician Well-Being. In bringing the committee to the SEA, the hope is to strengthen the intersection between education, anesthesia, and well-being and to continue the meaningful work that was started under the ASA. This committee aims to promote the physical, emotional, and mental well-being of anesthesia professionals and learners across the spectrum of their careers. Let’s delve into the key aspects of this exciting initiative.

The Society for Education in Anesthesia (SEA) values scholarship and an inclusive community in medicine. As educators we understand that the foundation of a diverse and inclusive physician care team starts in medical school. A diverse workforce has been shown to “lead to higher-quality work, better decision-making, greater team satisfaction, and more equality.”^{1, 2, 3} All individuals, if they so desire, should have an equitable opportunity to become a physician educator and be part of a diverse workforce. The Embracing Anti – Discrimination, Unbiased Curriculum, and Advancing Truth in Education (EDUCATE) Act, H.R. 7725, violates the values of SEA. SEA strongly opposes the EDUCATE Act and continues to strive for inclusion and diversity in medicine.

1. Minkin R. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Workplace. Pew Research Center, March 2023.
2. Ely RJ and Thomas DA. Getting Serious About Diversity: Enough Already with the Business Case. It’s time for a new way of thinking. HBR Nov-Dec 2020.
3. Gomez LE, Bernet P. Diversity improves performance and outcomes. J Natl Med Assoc. 2019 Aug;111(4):383-392. doi: 10.1016/j.jnma.2019.01.006. Epub 2019 Feb 11. PMID: 30765101.

Anxious People

Dr. Sukhman Shergill

When someone can make mundane things seem interesting to you, that for me is a mark of a great writer. And one such favorite of mine is Fredrik Backman and his book called Anxious People. Fredrik is a NY Times bestselling author who comes from Sweden and is also a columnist and a blogger. His works have been published in more than 40 countries all over. Through his works of fiction, he focuses on the essence of being a human while navigating life, in a very uplifting way which makes for great bedtime read.

Anxious people is a tragicomic tale set in a small town of Sweden, where a series of events unfold on New Year’s eve. His story is character focused and goes back and forth between multiple characters giving the book a quick pace, but since he tackles a complex storyline with greatly lucid writing, it is easy to keep up. The story starts as a robbery that turns into a hostage situation, and when you imagine it going in one direction the plot pivots in the most unexpected and poignant ways. The narrative revolves around the stories of the characters which are - a robber, the policemen and the hostages and what a situation can bring out of different people.