Teaching objectives are the soul and pillar of teaching activity and closely related to class teaching effects. Currently, the cognition and formulation of faculty teaching objectives in standardized training for residency practitioners (abbreviated as general practice residency) has been rarely reported at present.

To understand the cognition, formulation basis, construction and writing of teaching objectives among outstanding teachers of general practice in China, so as to discuss the approaches of teachers to better promote teaching through teaching objectives in the general practice residency during the process of developing general practice residency, which is highly specialized, focused on post competency development, and different from institutional education.

The outstanding general practice teachers with the title of associate chief physician and above and related teaching honors on a college level or above, who have been teaching in general practice residency for 5 years or more and are still involved in teaching visits and developing teaching objectives in their teaching activities were selected as research subjects from the general practice departments of national general practice residency base in the hospitals affiliated with well-known medical colleges located in the regions with high development level of general practice. One-to-one semi-structured in-depth interview was conducted by online video conference from February to June 2022. The thematic framework analysis was used to organize and analyze the data and to refine the interview themes through NVivo 12 software.

A total of 8 general practice teachers were enrolled. Through the analysis of the interview data, a total of 3 themes and 4 sub-themes were extracted, including that general practice teachers can better grasp the establishment principles of teaching objectives; there is a lack of institutional guarantees in the construction of teaching objectives, involving 2 sub-themes of the lack of theoretical foundation and normative environment for the construction of teaching objectives; general practice teachers have insufficient cognition of the role of teaching objectives in the development of post competency, involving 2 sub-themes of cognitive deficiencies in teaching objectives, little significance of teaching objectives in guiding teaching activities.

There are still problems in the recognition and formulation of teaching objectives even among the outstanding general practice teachers, which may affect the teaching effects. It is necessary to focus on and ensure the effective formulation of teaching objectives and enhance relevant theoretical training. The teaching objectives should be taken as a starting point to promote the homogeneous development and construction of general practice teachers, so as to train more qualified general practitioners.