ICRE recently connected with Drs. Andrew Warren and Lara Hazelton to discuss the challenge of effectively teaching the CanMEDS Professional Role. This issue and more will be explored in their October 20 ICRE workshop: “Teaching and evaluating the CanMEDS Professional Role: Program directors’ perspectives”.
What are some of the most common concerns educators express about teaching and evaluating professionalism?
Program directors cited lack of clarity around the elements/ domains of the professional role, difficulties in translating resident attitudes into behaviours, getting faculty buy-in, understanding generational differences that contribute to differences in the interpretation of what constitutes a professional, the challenge of teaching “hard wired” qualities such as honesty and integrity and assessing the effectiveness of learning this type of attribute, as challenges to teaching and evaluating professionalism.
Teaching professionalism seems to encompasses a wide variety of concepts and topics. What are the most important ones to focus on?
We recently surveyed Canadian program directors, and found a gap between what they considered the most important, which included values or traits such as honesty and integrity, and what they were most commonly teaching which was bioethical principles and theories. The challenge is how we can teach and evaluate important aspects of professionalism that are difficult to define.
Given the importance of role modeling as a teaching tool, do educators’ own lapses in professionalism pose a barrier to teaching professionalism? If so, how can educators address these moments in an effective educational manner?
Educators we spoke with recognize the significant positive and negative effects role modeling can have on a resident’s internalization of professional values. Sometimes negative experiences are recognized as such by resident-learners and taken as “responses to avoid”. At other times, “culture” as established by the behaviour of teachers has a significant negative effect on residents. Discussing incidents of professional and unprofessional behaviour when they are observed in the workplace, or after reflecting on one’s own suboptimal response to a particular situation can be an effective educational technique.
What themes will your ICRE workshop explore?
The workshop will explore how individual participants rank the relative importance of each of the specific elements of the professional role and the reasons behind this. A discussion of how they teach and evaluate the role in their own institutions will lead in to a discussion of some of the techniques used by other program directors from around the country. Working in groups and using a staged mapping exercise, participants will develop a teaching and evaluation plan for some of the role’s elements that they can apply to their own teaching environment or program.
What are some of the challenges educators can expect to face when implementing these new approaches into their training programs?
Faculty and resident buy-in is a potential challenge, as is the time and resource requirement for activities like reflective practice exercises, portfolio development and review, and multisource feedback tools. However, culture is changing and with the right champion(s), these things can be done and resident learning can be enhanced. We will be talking more about how, at the workshop.
Register now for ICRE and attend the dynamic October 20 workshop, “Teaching and evaluating the CanMEDS Professional Role: Program directors’ perspectives” and more than 60 other ICRE sessions.
Leave a Reply