Editorial

Medical education is a new discipline which started about 50 years ago. The pioneer of this discipline was George Miller from the University of Chicago who suggested most of prominent medical professionals have little or no knowledge of psychology of learning and advocated the validity of present medical education in the world. He hypothesized that while very eminent and well trained scientific oriented medical teachers were very well qualified in their prospective field of medicine, they were not well aware, nor utilized the psychology of learning. Therefore, their effort in training medical students was partially wasted. He emphasized the goal oriented learning and suggested that we, as academic teachers of medical sciences, must switch our emphasis from teaching to learning. He also proposed that every teacher of medicine” clearing the objective and every course in medicine” it was the further the fact that the objective should be in the form of “behavioral objective” and emphasized that this objective should be well spelled out and clearly defined and written in advance. Fortunately, one of our academicians, Dr. Bahman Joorabchi, who was in Chicago gets in touch with Dr. Miller and soon became the pioneer of medical education after his return to Shiraz Medical School. In early 1970’s the Department of Medical Education was established in Shiraz Medical School. A number of workshops were carried out by Dr. Joorabchi for professors of clinical and basic sciences. Also a number of professors from different disciplines, from both clinical and basic sciences, were sent to Chicago to get up-to-date in medical education. On return, they themselves became the instructor and facilitator of these workshops. These workshops were so successful that soon entire medical schools of Iran became interested and invited the Shiraz group to carry on these workshops all over the country. The World Health Organization noted the great success of this department and soon Shiraz became the World Health Organization Center for medical education for the entire region of Eastern Mediterranean. In early 2011, based on the demand of participants of these workshops, we started planning a publication. We hope that all interested individuals as well as former scholars of this department collaborate with us to achieve our mission. We are looking forward to all constructive suggestions and criticism. The young and enthusiastic staff of this department are keen to receive your correspondence and emails.