Actionable companion · School leadership and instructional improvement

From leadership research to district action: Building and Sustaining Scholarly Communities in Health Professions Education: Lessons from U.S. Academies

AI-assisted editorial implementation guide. Proposed district actions are separate from the original authors’ findings and recommendations. Independent peer review of this guide is not asserted.

Evidence and transfer

Education-related source: verify which participants, institutions and outcomes were actually studied before district adoption. Source publication type: research-article. License and identity checks do not establish study quality or causality.

Original authors’ abstract, reproduced under the source license:

Introduction: Academic health centers have invested in academies to promote health professions education scholarship, yet many struggle to sustain vibrant scholarly communities. We aimed to identify practices that support their development and long-term sustainability. Methods: Using a constructivist approach, we conducted a qualitative interview study in 2025 with leaders from all four geographic regions of the U.S. Inclusion criteria required that participants direct an academy or analogous institutional structure intended to promote educational scholarship, and that they could speak to building and sustaining this community in their local context. The Communities of Practice (CoP) framework informed interview guide development and data interpretation. Results: Twenty-one academy leaders described five interrelated forms of leadership work that shaped sustainable scholarly communities: (1) building foundations that legitimize educational scholarship by securing institutional investment, leadership buy-in, and succession planning; (2) cultivating scholarly sanctuary to counter isolation through psychologically safe, inclusive communities; (3) making scholarship feasible under constraints by creating low-barrier entry points, translating value to leaders, and addressing barriers; (4) tending growth through layered, incremental development, including cohort programs, consultation, mentoring, grants, and flexible participation; and (5) making educational scholarship visible and valued through recognition, dissemination, and outcome tracking. Discussion: Viewed through the CoP framework, the themes illuminate how leaders cultivated a shared domain of legitimate educational scholarship, a community of relational support, and a practice of tools, routines, and developmental infrastructure. The themes also reveal that sustainable communities of practice do not emerge from any single academy model, but from context-sensitive alignment of structure, culture, and incentives.

A 90-day district inquiry

1. Days 1–15 · Appraise. Read the source methods, recruitment, comparator, outcomes and limitations. Record how the study setting differs from your district and which claim the design can support.
2. Days 16–30 · Design. Choose one school improvement question with teachers. Protect a short shared planning cycle, agree an instructional change and use a common rubric for examining student work. Agree participation, privacy protections, baseline and stopping rules before starting.
3. Days 31–60 · Observe. Collect the pre-agreed measures, keep a log of implementation changes and invite confidential voluntary feedback. Preserve existing support for staff and learners.
4. Days 61–90 · Decide. Review implementation fidelity, teacher time and independently scored student work against a recorded baseline. Examine access differences and competing explanations before attributing changes to leadership. Make a dated decision to stop, revise or extend the inquiry.

Board decision brief

Present the local problem, source setting, evidence limits, intervention, responsible owner, total cost, measured changes and uncertainty. Separate staff perceptions, implementation measures and student learning outcomes.

Attribution and reuse

Anthony R. Artino; Zareen Zaidi; Farida Izzi; Shazia Samanani; Navin Sampathkumar; Ahdeah Pajoohesh-Ganji. Building and Sustaining Scholarly Communities in Health Professions Education: Lessons from U.S. Academies. Perspectives on Medical Education (2026-08-25). https://doi.org/10.5334/pme.3131

Prepared 2026-11-07. Source authorship and DOI are preserved. The abstract and source passages are attributed extracts; this editorial guide is offered under the same CC BY 4.0 license.