The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) requires faculty to pursue annual development to enhance their teaching skills. Few studies exist on how to identify and improve the quality of teaching provided by faculty educators. Understanding the correlation between numeric scores assigned to faculty educators and their tangible, practical teaching skills would be beneficial.

This study aimed to identify and describe qualities that differentiate numerically highly rated and low-rated physician educators.

This observational mixed-methods study evaluated attending physician educators between July 1, 2015, and June 30, 2021. Quantitative analysis involved descriptive statistics, normalization of scores, and stratification of faculty into tertiles based on a summary score. We compared the highest and lowest tertiles during qualitative analyses of residents’ comments.

Twenty-five attending physicians and 111 residents in an internal medicine residency program.

Resident evaluations of faculty educators, including 724 individual assessments of faculty educators on 15 variables related to the ACGME core competencies.

Quantitative analyses revealed variation in attending physician educators’ performance across the ACGME core competencies. The highest-rated teaching qualities were interpersonal and communication skills, medical knowledge, and professionalism, while the lowest-rated teaching quality was systems-based practice. Qualitative analyses identified themes distinguishing high-quality from low-quality attending physician educators, such as balancing autonomy and supervision, role modeling, engagement, availability, compassion, and excellent teaching.

This study provides insights into areas where attending physicians’ educational strategies can be improved, emphasizing the importance of role modeling and effective communication. Ongoing efforts are needed to enhance the quality of faculty educators and resident education in internal medicine residency programs.