Skip to Content
Nationally recognized FIU physician provides faculty development to help colleagues become effective educators
Dr. Suzanne Minor

Nationally recognized FIU physician provides faculty development to help colleagues become effective educators

December 20, 2021 at 12:00pm

There is little room in a physician's education journey for dedicated career development or a path to academia. They take the MCAT, enroll in med school, match with residency, graduate, achieve board certification, practice, and then jump into teaching students.

Dr. Suzanne Minor helps narrow the gap between medicine, academia and personal development at the FIU Herbert Wertheim College of Medicine (HWCOM).

"For those clinical faculty who want to grow into scholars, I want to facilitate that growth," Minor says.

Minor is a nationally recognized board-certified family medicine physician who joined HWCOM in 2010 as the founding family medicine clerkship director and is currently assistant dean of faculty development. Minor has gained recognition for her leadership role in the Society for Teachers for Family Medicine (STFM). She is director of the society's New Faculty Scholars Program, a one-year coaching and learning initiative that she also participated in and completed in 2014. In addition. Minor — a member of STFM Foundation Board of Trustees — will chair the upcoming 2022 STFM Medical Student Education Conference. 

Minor offers faculty in-person presentations, one-on-one meetings, online modules and bountiful digital resources as part of her development curriculum. HWCOM faculty are prepared for difficult conversations after attending Minor's workshop, Crucial Conversations, a one-hour interactive presentation. A crucial conversation is a discussion between two or more people where stakes are high, opinions vary and/or emotions run strong.

The goal of the workshop is for participants to learn how to contribute to the pool of shared meaning—which is that the more each person's meaning is added into the collective pool, the more information is available to everyone involved, and better decisions are made. Faculty benefit from Minor's presentation because they are equipped to communicate effectively with students, colleagues and superiors.

Since 2010, Minor has provided hundreds of learning opportunities, creating a pipeline for medical educators to transfer their clinical skills into clinical teaching. In addition, she has navigated her teachings through an incremental increase of diversification at FIU HWCOM. Her primary work is training clinical faculty to teach in the clinical setting and developing clerkship directors in faculty development.