Reflection on the “Seminar of Extraordinary Teachers” under the patronage of the Ukrainian-Swiss project “Development of the Medical Education”

Abstract

This article is an analytical reflection on the “Seminar of Extraordinary Teachers” of the winter session 2026 (Zdeniievo village, Zakarpattia), held under the slogan “the human being in teaching.” The path of a teacher begins precisely with empathy toward the individual, as teaching today requires not only professional knowledge and competencies in medicine or other fields. A progressive educator starts working both with the audience as a whole and with each individual student by building psycho-emotional contact (mutual respect, goodwill, compassion, and the ability to listen), fostering two-way cooperation and engagement in the educational process. This creates an essential basis and a strong foundation for knowledge acquisition.

During the seminar, participants examined the learning process through their own perceptions of problems, challenges, outcomes, and successes, as well as through their perception of the student audience. Each subsequent day of training and working meetings began with a reflection on the events of the previous day, which became an important summary and understanding of the work carried out by the “peer group.” Regardless of participants’ experience, position, age, or knowledge, everyone had equal rights, responsibilities, and obligations to one another.

The facilitation and professional skills of the project coordinators and teachers (Olena Ihnashchuk, Olha Bershadska, Nataliia Starynska, Olena Tytarenko, Kateryna Stepurko) created conditions for combining individual and collective work using various methods and techniques (such as competency equalizer construction, Dilts’ pyramid, polarity mapping, etc.), as well as discussing homework assignments prepared prior to the trip.

The aim of the article is to reconstruct, through personal reflection, important discussion points and debates on contemporary medical education using the proposed methods and techniques applied at the Seminar of Extraordinary Teachers within the framework of the Ukrainian-Swiss project “Development of Medical Education.” Communication and empathy became key elements in the seminar’s work for implementing a plan to strengthen human resources in healthcare.

Results and Conclusions:The main key to solving tasks was the motto: “Don’t say no – think about how it can be done,” which fosters flexible thinking for understanding problems and finding ways to solve them, as well as resilience during this challenging period in Ukraine and amid global socio-economic and political trends, since life cannot be put on pause. The exchange of experience, communication, and the resolution of urgent current issues during the seminar helped me reorganize and redistribute my professional and personal responsibilities, analyze them, and build my own frameworks for further development (balancing teaching and research work), while learning to distinguish between professional and personal aspects of life without losing the boundaries between them.