Teaching medical students how to teach is a rapidly expanding area of medical education. At most institutions, the primary function of these efforts is to improve the teaching of students who serve as near-peer teachers or tutors. Several recent scoping reviews of medical students-as-teachers (SaT) programs [1,2,3,4] outline the multiple reasons for their growth. Medical student teaching programs can positively impact the student learners, the medical school program, and the medical student teachers themselves. Medical student teaching assistants (TAs) can provide near-peer teaching as well as coaching to other students. Many medical educators experience challenges with teaching difficult concepts despite being experts in their field [5] while TAs may be more accessible to certain groups of student learners as they focus on the essentials of what needs to be learned at that moment. In this way, medical student teaching programs can impact organizational effectiveness. TAs enhance their own teaching efficacy and typically consolidate their knowledge of the curricular content [4]. Serving as a TA can help lay the foundation for professional identity formation as a medical educator. Experience as a TA may encourage a medical student to pursue one of the increasing number of residencies and fellowships that have educational tracks [6,7,8].

Teaching assistantships have existed in the basic and applied sciences for over 50 years as a way for PhD students to both fund their education as well as teach service courses for their departments [9]. However, in medicine and as well as in other disciplines, SaT Programs, lack systematic programing to train the TAs in pedagogical content knowledge. Most TAs participate in some sort of program- which can vary from a one-day workshop, learning communities that meet weekly to discuss teaching assignments, teaching mentors, participation in teaching seminar, observations of award-winning faculty, or year-long courses aimed to enhance teaching skills [10, 11]. However, our medical students did not have access to any department or university wide programing to prepare them to serve as TAs. This led to the development of our own University of Virginia School of Medicine teaching courses as described below.