Dust Off Your Projects: A Workshop to Get Stalled Scholarship Moving

Welcome back to MedEdMentor Mondays! This is the second post in this new series, and it introduces a different kind of post: sharing the materials for a workshop.

Let me give you a little background. This workshop was developed with The Patricia A. Tietjen, MD, Teaching Academy at Northwell Health. It was actually Beth West, EdD, Executive Director, who came up with the idea, and I ran with it. The idea addresses an issue that is common in our field: how to support scholars who no longer have an explicit structure built around them. That is the phenomenon we were interested in trying to address.

Quick aside: talking about phenomena and problems harkens back to a previous post of mine on the Abstracting-Contextualizing Model (ACM), the output of a study I did with Greg and our very much human mentor, Bridget O’Brien, PhD, MS. A key step in creating scholarship that is meaningful to the entire field is extrapolating from a specific problem in a specific context to a phenomenon the whole field recognizes. In this case, the phenomenon (how to keep supporting scholars after they graduate from a program) was extrapolated from…

…the specific problem Beth and her team were trying to work out in their Teaching Academy. I had the chance to visit them in person in June of this year (2026) and see them in action. Beth and her team (shoutouts to Nicole, Haley, and Jen) have built an amazing program. The Teaching Academy provides clinician educator scholars with a structured learning experience that combines regular didactic sessions, dedicated mentorship, and project guidance from the start. Many participants return as continuing scholars after their first year, where they receive ongoing support as they continue developing their educational research projects.

However, like all programs like this (and I have been a part of many), there is a lot of momentum and impetus to get things done while you are in a structured program. Then, productivity drops when people are left to their own devices. Beth wanted to do something about this. So the idea was to create a session for the continuing scholars, to help them move along any scholarship that has stagnated. That is where “Dust Off Your Projects” came from.

How the workshop runs

My thinking going into building this was I wanted the workshop to utilize MedEdMentor and Uni, our AI mentor, but also to promote teamwork, community building, and human-to-human engagement.

I started the session by breaking the ice a little and normalizing stalled projects. We are all very busy people with many different roles in our lives that are important to us, both at work and beyond. I didn’t want anyone to feel bad for having education work sitting on the back burner. We’ve all been there and it says nothing about us as educators, scholars, clinicians, parents, spouses, etc.

After that, the session goes into pairs, where people question one another and help each other clearly identify where the project has stalled. Was it at the data collection phase? Analysis? Already at the writing and getting-published phase? Which is a particularly hard phase for a lot of us (my hand is raised, you just can’t see it from there.) We gave them specific questions they could use to stimulate conversation: what are you working on, in two sentences; what phase is it actually in right now; what is the last thing you did for it; why exactly did you stop; why is it still sitting there; and what is the single next action it needs. Six minutes each, one talks and one asks, then switches for another six minutes. The workshop also includes space for people who don’t have an active project and want to approach the exercises from the angle of developing a new idea.

Then the whole group comes back together and talks about the sticking points people identified. This helps everyone see that people get stuck at similar points, so that they feel less isolated as scholars, build more camaraderie and community, and perhaps find collaborators who are struggling with the same obstacles.

Then everyone goes back into their pairs and works with Uni to come up with specific plans to advance their projects. The take-away we wanted them to leave with is what we called a “5-5-5 Plan.” There is nothing special about that number. It could just as easily be 1-1-1, or 3-3-3. But...

What happened when we ran it

This was the first Academy session for continuing scholars of the 2026-2027 year, held virtually, with everyone joining from their offices or homes. There were about 15 scholars present; five were graduates of the most recent 2025-2026 cohort and the rest participated in cohorts from 2021-2025. The timing was kind of funny. I thought the whole session was an hour, but it turned out to be 90 minutes, so I crammed all my material into 45 minutes, and then I was wrapping up at what I thought was the end when it turned out we had an extra half hour. That is where a lot of the excellent reflections and thoughts came from.

The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and some things really stood out.

Mary Dorsey, a participant, and a cytologist (with an MBA) who is a laboratory operations leader in the Northwell Health System, said two things (unprompted, might I add) that seemed like ringing endorsements for working with Uni. The first was that she ran her own comparison during the workshop:

The second thing she said that stood out was that she remarked:

I reflected on what Mary was saying during the workshop. A real mentor, in my experience, can be really frustrating, but in a good way. Good mentors push you to do hard things. I can think back on conversations I have had during which, I have said (in my head), “stop it! I don’t want to do the hard thing.” Similarly, when I’m working with Uni, I find myself saying, “I don’t want to do what you’re asking me to do.” But it is trying to make you do the work, and make the decisions and the choices, and clarify what it is you care about and what you’re doing. So while it’s frustrating, Uni is acting like a mentor who says,

A clear example of this arose during the session when one of the participants put her project into Uni and asked for a 5-5-5 plan. The problem she was running into was a lack of institutional support, and going into the workshop, she thought there wasn’t a path forward for her work. This is how she described what happened when working with Uni:

“It pointed out several things that I didn’t entertain. It hit the obvious one, which was ‘you need a champion in a higher position.’ I’m like, ‘yeah, well, that’s kind of my issue. I don’t have one.’ So it asked me, ‘okay, well, if you don’t have one, let’s talk about why you did this project…’ And the fact that it outlines for me, okay, these are the people: it tells me to go towards the chief wellness officer, behavioral health leader, nursing leadership team. I never even entertained the wellness officer… I think [Uni] actually hit the nail on the head.”

While this person was talking, another participant that was listening went back to Uni to try to address her own problems finding institutional support. She soon reported back to the group that Uni had helped her identify novel approaches she previously had not considered. That is what Beth West was reacting to when she said,

Two other participants, both in nursing, found the exercise quite helpful and said it really pushed them along, but they noticed that a lot of the literature that came back was not nursing literature. This is a fair and accurate critique and something we have been working on for a while. Right now our literature search is just “Medical Education.” We built it around this narrow field as a test case of our machine learning approach to building our database. Our plan has always been to incorporate the entire health professions education corpus. However, the task of getting all of the different health professions literatures into our database is much more complicated, and requires a lot more computing power, than the first go-around, so it will take us some time. But, even without nursing-specific literature, these folks found the exercise and Uni to be quite useful, and we look forward to making the platform even more applicable to them. Stay tuned to our MedEdMentor Mondays for updates on the expansion of our database.

What is in the workshop package, and what you need to run it

In this post you will find the PDF of the facilitator guide and the slides. Both are shared under a Creative Commons license, so you are welcome to use them and adapt them for your own program with no worries. Just let your participants know where you got the materials.

This is an easy workshop to run with very little prep. The person running it needs the slides and the facilitator guide, and should review both before the session; otherwise it should be relatively straightforward. Our participants received an email ahead of time telling them the topic and asking them to come with a stalled project in mind, or a new project if they didn’t have a stalled one. The point of the workshop is to use Uni, so ideally the people running this and their audience would have access to the full MedEdMentor suite of tools, including Uni.

Click here for workshop materials

What I would love from you

This workshop was built to showcase and utilize Uni. If you have access to Uni, run the workshop and tell me how it went. We would love to hear about your experience and improve and update the materials from what you learned. If you do not have access to Uni for yourself or your learners, I ask that you review the workshop materials and try to picture running it for your audience, and what that might look like. Do you think it would be successful? Do you think they would enjoy it? Do you think it would move their projects forward? Do you see this, and workshops like this, as potentially useful to yourself, your colleagues, or your learners? If so, I’d love to talk to you.

Write to me at: geoffstetson@mededmentor.org

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you back here next Monday!