Teaching styles in Cuban Higher Medical Education

Abstract

Introduction: Higher education promotes educational processes, while medical education faces the challenge of training health professionals with a sense of social responsibility. Teaching and learning methods must intentionally encourage an active and productive approach to knowledge and foster independent, creative, and responsible thinking.
Objective: To analyze the historical background of teaching styles within the context of higher education in general, as well as the educational processes of Cuban medical education particularly.
Method: A literature review was conducted using various scientific and research methods. The research drew on SciELO and PubMed databases, in digital format, in Spanish and English, covering the second half of the 20th century through 2025.
Development: Teaching styles are the ways in which teachers carry out the teaching-learning process and incorporate consistent behaviors that shape student-teacher relationships. Studies provide key insights for identifying, characterizing, and classifying preferences in educational research across various contexts and disciplines, as well as their relationship to learning styles.
Conclusions: Theoretical frameworks for teaching styles reveal limitations, in general, within the context of higher education and, in particular, in medical education. Research findings are theoretical and descriptive in nature, with shortcomings in their approach from an integrative perspective. There is ambiguity between the factors that characterize teaching styles and the necessary connections among them, which prevents the formulation of a concrete proposal for their development.