When Your Chair Doesn’t Value Education: Strategies to Still Advance

The problem is not that your chair “doesn’t get it.” The problem is that you’re trying to build an education career in a department that fundamentally does not value it—and you’re still hoping they’ll change. They probably will not.

You can still advance anyway.

This is the reality for a lot of clinician-educators and medical teachers: you love teaching, but you’re in a service-heavy, RVU-obsessed department where education is lip service at best. Let’s assume you’re not ready (or able) to move jobs tomorrow. You still need an actual strategy, not vague pep talks.

Here is what to do if your chair doesn’t value education, and you still want to build a serious academic or teaching-focused career.

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Step 1: Diagnose Your Chair’s Actual Priorities (Not Their Words)

Before you plan your escape or your workaround, you need to understand exactly what game you’re playing.

Ask yourself, concretely:

• What does my chair explicitly praise in meetings?
• Who gets promoted fastest here—and why?
• Who gets the best schedules, support staff, or protected time?
• What does my chair complain about most? Coverage? Margin? Press-Ganey?

You’re looking for data, not vibes.

If the people getting held up as “stars” in your department are:

• High RVU machines
• Big grant folks
• People who say yes to all coverage holes

…and you have never once seen anyone promoted or rewarded for overseeing clerkship admin, building curricula, or being a great bedside teacher, then education is not a real currency there. At least not with your chair.

That means two things:

1. You won’t be able to convert your chair.
2. You need to convert your teaching into something someone else values.

So your mental shift is this: Stop trying to convince your chair that teaching is important. Start figuring out who outside your department does care—and how to align your work with them.

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Step 2: Separate “What You Do” From “Where You Get Credit”

You can be in a department that does not value education and still build a strong educator career, if you stop expecting all the credit to come from inside your department.

Think of it like this: your day job is one thing; your career narrative can come from somewhere else.

You need two parallel tracks:

1. Local survival track – doing just enough of what your chair cares about so you’re not on their radar as a problem.
2. Career advancement track – doing education work that is legible and valued by:
   • the medical school or GME office
   • national societies
   • regional education organizations
   • other departments that do care

The mistake I see: people pour themselves into “invisible” education work that only the chair sees (and dismisses) and don’t build anything public or portable.

If you’re going to build teaching materials, design curricula, or run simulations, you’re going to do that somewhere. You might as well do it in a way that:

• creates products (modules, workshops, evaluations, publications)
• puts your name in front of someone who can write you a real letter or support a promotion
• can follow you when you eventually leave

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Step 3: Turn Every Teaching Thing You Do into a Product

Raw teaching effort is cheap in a lot of departments. Everyone “teaches on rounds,” “took a few students,” “gave grand rounds once.” That is not a career.

What counts is products—things you can show, count, and list.

Take a hard look at what you’re already doing:

• Do you run a recurring conference?
• Do you orient residents or students?
• Do you give any regular teaching sessions?
• Did you fix a broken rotation or onboarding process?

Now ask: how can I convert this into something citable?

Some examples:

• That recurring session → turn it into a series with objectives, evaluation forms, and an official title.
• That “orientation talk” → convert it into a structured workshop and submit it as a workshop at a regional or national education conference (STFM, APDIM, SAEM, etc. depending on your field).
• That revamped rotation schedule → write it up as a curriculum innovation and submit to MedEdPORTAL or your specialty’s education journal.
• That ad hoc debrief you lead on the wards → design it as a formal debriefing model and study it (even simple pre/post).

You’re doing the work anyway. Productize it.

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Step 4: Build a Network That Skips Your Chair

You will not build an education career waiting for your chair’s blessing. You need a network that exists above and around them.

Concrete moves:

1. Connect with the med school or GME office.
   Email the Associate Dean for Undergraduate or Graduate Medical Education (whichever fits you). One sentence email:

   “I’m Dr. X in [department]. I’m very interested in medical education and would love to be more involved in teaching or educational projects at the institutional level—do you have any committees, courses, or pilot projects that need help?”

   You’d be surprised how often the answer is, “Yes, please.”

2. Find the education people in other departments.
   There is almost always a core of education-focused folks—IM, peds, EM, family med, sometimes surgery—who organize:

   • faculty development sessions
   • teaching academies
   • education research groups

   Show up. Attend. Ask if they need facilitators, small group leaders, or help piloting something.

3. Join a national or regional education community.
   Look for the education arm of your specialty’s society (e.g., Council of Residency Directors, clerkship directors groups, teaching academies). Pay the fee if you can. If you cannot, ask for institutional support or a fee waiver.

   Then, do not just be a member. Volunteer. Review abstracts. Serve on a subcommittee. This is how you meet people who will later write you letters and invite you to collaborate.

You want your “education identity” to live somewhere with infrastructure. That usually means med school or GME offices and professional societies.

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Step 5: Get Very Clear on Your Promotion Pathway

Here’s where people shoot themselves in the foot: they assume promotion will magically reward “good teaching” just because they’re nice, students like them, and they work hard.

No.

You need to know the actual rules of the game outside your chair’s opinion.

Track down:

• your institution’s promotion and tenure guidelines for clinician-educator or teaching tracks
• any sample CVs of promoted educators
• any rubrics for teaching excellence awards or educator pathways

Then map what you have against what’s expected.

Common buckets for education promotion:

• Teaching excellence – evaluations, awards, teaching volume
• Educational leadership – course/clerkship/program director roles, committee chairs
• Educational scholarship – publications, MedEdPORTAL products, funded education projects, invited talks/workshops

Category	Typical Evidence
Teaching Excellence	Learner evals, peer evals, awards
Educational Leadership	Director roles, committee leadership
Scholarship	MedEd publications, curricula, grants
Service	Institutional or society-level service

Now you have a target. Notice what this list does not say:

• “Chair thinks education is important.”
• “Department chair personally impressed.”

They can slow you down by blocking titles or playing games, but if you’re in a system with any structure, there is usually a path that does not rely on their emotional buy-in as long as your dossier is strong.

If your system is totally chair-dependent and hostile to teaching tracks, that’s intel you need early. It means your future advancement probably requires leaving. You can still spend the next 12–24 months building products and relationships that will travel with you.

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Step 6: Protect Time Without Asking Your Chair’s Permission for Everything

You will not get “proper” protected time from a chair who doesn’t value education. Stop waiting for it.

Instead, you quietly carve out predictable, defendable blocks where you do high-yield education work.

That means:

• Identify 2–4 hours per week you can reliably block. Early mornings before clinic. One lighter half-day. A Sunday block if you have to, short-term.
• Use those hours deliberately. Not charting. Not random email. Pure “career-building education time” for:
  • writing up a curriculum
  • preparing a workshop submission
  • working on an education paper or MedEdPORTAL product
  • revising your educator portfolio

You do not announce this as “protected time” to your chair. You just…do it. If your schedule is truly brick-walled, then the honest answer is: you may need to under-function slightly on the extras your chair loves (committees, extra coverage, endless QI) to create bandwidth for your real career work.

I’ve seen this play out in real life: the “perfect team player” who says yes to every coverage hole but never publishes or builds anything meaningful gets stuck as an assistant professor forever. The one who quietly guards time, says no strategically, and builds scholarship—gets out.

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Step 7: Be Strategic About What You Say Yes To

If your chair doesn’t value education, they’ll often still throw you “education-adjacent” tasks—because no one else wants them.

Things like:

• being the “student coordinator” with no title
• fixing a broken schedule for residents
• handling onboarding materials
• managing evaluation logistics

These can either be a trap (busy work that burns you out) or a launchpad (platforms you use to create leadership and products). The difference is what you do with them.

Before you agree, ask yourself:

1. Can I turn this into a named role that sounds official?
   “Student schedule helper” → “Associate Site Director for the [X] Clerkship”

2. Is there something publishable hiding in here?
   E.g., you redesign the schedule, measure burnout or satisfaction pre/post, and submit an abstract.

3. Will this connect me to people outside my department (clerkship directors, program directors, academic affairs)?

If you cannot get a better title, cannot carve scholarship out of it, and cannot meet important people through it—say no, or severely limit your involvement.

You are not obligated to take on every education-consistent chore just because you “care about teaching.” That’s how chairs exploit educators.

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Step 8: Create Measurable Teaching Impact That Doesn’t Need Chair Approval

Chairs who don’t value education often handwave teaching impact as “nice but soft.” Do not fight that fight head-on with emotions. Fight with numbers and outcomes.

Examples of measurable impact:

• Pre/post learner confidence scores for your workshop or simulation
• Attendance or completion rates for materials you create
• Improved test scores, milestone performance, or clinical outcomes linked to your teaching
• Adoption of your materials by other sites or departments

Design your education work so that from day one you’re collecting data. One simple move: add a short evaluation to every repeated session.

Even easier: build one solid project and follow a basic timeline from “idea” to “product.”

Education Project from Idea to Scholarship

Step	Description
Step 1	Identify Teaching Problem
Step 2	Design Intervention
Step 3	Implement with Learners
Step 4	Collect Evaluations and Data
Step 5	Analyze and Summarize Results
Step 6	Present Locally
Step 7	Submit to Conference or Journal

Notice who you never see in that flowchart: your chair.

They can ignore you in meetings. They cannot erase your conference abstract accepted by your specialty’s national meeting.

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Step 9: Build a Parallel Identity as a “Recognized Educator”

You want people—inside and outside your institution—to start thinking of you not just as “that doc in X department,” but as “a serious medical educator.”

Practically, that means:

• Have a clean, updated CV in educator format (with teaching sections, education scholarship, invited workshops).
• Build a minimal professional presence:
  • a simple one-page website or institutional profile that emphasizes your teaching roles and education work
  • updated profiles on major organizations (LinkedIn, specialty society)
• Collect letters and emails from students and residents who praise your teaching. Those can support teaching awards and promotion, even if your chair is lukewarm.

Also, look for institutional signals you can add to your name:

• teaching academy membership
• “education scholar” or “faculty development program” completion
• small internal grants for curriculum development

These give you credibility that doesn’t depend on your chair saying, “She’s excellent.”

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Step 10: Decide How Long You’re Willing to Stay and Set a Concrete Exit or Leverage Plan

You cannot stay indefinitely in a misaligned environment and expect it not to warp your career. At some point, you make one of two decisions:

1. “I will use this job as a platform for 1–3 years to build my education portfolio, then I will leave for a place that values it.”
2. “I’m staying in this department long-term, but I’m going to anchor my education career outside it—through the med school, GME, or national roles.”

Either choice requires a timeline. Open-ended misery is not a strategy.

Sketch a simple 2-year plan (yes, literally write it down):

Year 1 goals:

• One accepted education abstract or workshop at a regional/national meeting
• One educational product submitted (e.g., MedEdPORTAL, specialty education journal)
• One official role with a title that includes “education,” “curriculum,” or “director”
• Join one education committee or academy

Year 2 goals:

• At least one publication or accepted curriculum
• A stronger leadership role (course, rotation, or program)
• Enough dossier strength that if you applied elsewhere, you’d be competitive

Sample Two-Year Education Career Goals

Category	Value
Abstracts	2
Publications	1
Leadership Roles	2
Committees	2

Then evaluate: is your current department compatible with hitting these numbers if you’re shrewd about your time? If yes, stay long enough to build the portfolio. If not, you start networking your way out now.

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Managing the Emotional Side Without Self-Sabotage

Let’s be blunt: having your work ignored or minimized by your own leadership is demoralizing. People start:

• venting constantly to colleagues
• getting cynical and pulling back from teaching
• oversharing their frustration with trainees or allies who don’t have power

Do not self-immolate.

Channel that frustration into action:

• Instead of complaining about your chair in the hallway, use that time to email the med school Dean’s office about opportunities.
• Instead of doomscrolling after a bad faculty meeting, work 30 minutes on your abstract.
• Instead of telling yourself “they don’t care,” tell yourself “I’m building somewhere else.”

You are not obligated to convert your chair. You are obligated—to yourself—to build a career that aligns with what you care about.

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A Quick Word About Residents and Early-Career Folks

If you’re still a resident, fellow, or very junior faculty and already seeing that leadership does not care about education, do not romanticize “sticking it out” long-term.

You can:

• start joining national education committees as a trainee
• submit small education projects (QI with a teaching component, curriculum tweaks) early
• be strategic in choosing your first job—look for departments with vice chairs for education, teaching academies, and real educator tracks

Suffering in a hostile environment as a badge of honor is not noble. It’s just expensive. In time, energy, and stalled momentum.

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What to Do Today

Do not wait for another frustrating meeting to “motivate” you. Do one small, offensive move toward your educator career right now:

Open your calendar and block a recurring 2-hour weekly slot labeled “Education Career Work,” then pick the first task: draft an email to your med school’s education office asking how you can get involved.