ProcedureAsk any respected proceduralist where their teaching material comes from and you will hear the same origin story: "cases I collected over the years." Ask a junior colleague why they have no teaching file yet and you will hear the same excuse: "I'll start organizing one when I have time."
The seniors never had time either. They had a habit.
Teaching material is a by-product, not a project
The mistake is imagining the teaching file as a project — a weekend of sorting images and writing captions. Projects like that get postponed indefinitely. The proceduralists with great teaching files never did that weekend. They made a five-second decision at the end of certain cases: this one is worth keeping.
A star on a case. An anonymized image saved while it was on the screen anyway. One sentence about why it matters. That is the entire habit. The file assembles itself.
What earns a star
Not just the spectacular saves. The most useful teaching cases are often quieter:
- The classic presentation — the textbook anatomy you will want when explaining the standard approach.
- The near-miss — where you recognized the problem one step before it happened. These teach judgment, which is harder to teach than technique.
- The decision fork — cases where two approaches were defensible and you can articulate why you chose yours.
- The humbling one — the complication with an honest reflection attached. Nothing earns a room's trust like a senior showing their own difficult case.
The habit pays twice
The first payment is obvious: when you are asked to give the residents' teaching session, the material exists. Filter by star, pull the images, done — preparation measured in minutes.
The second payment is subtler and larger: the five-second "is this teachable?" question is itself a reflection prompt. Deciding why a case matters forces you to articulate the lesson — and articulated lessons are the ones you retain. You are not just collecting material for future students. You are teaching yourself, one star at a time.
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