Multidisciplinary Practice

This week was our group presentations. We were assigned the task of creating a presentation related to teaching in multidisciplinary practice environments. As a group we used Microsoft Teams and Google Docs to coordinate our ideas and bring together our project. We quickly learned that there were so many different concepts and ideas under the umbrella of issues in multidisciplinary practice that we would need to narrow our focus. To stay in line with course themes and with course content, we focused our presentation to preparing nursing students for interprofessional practice.

This was a great learning experience for me. The project came together well, and our group was composed of members with similar learning styles and work ethic, so there were no major bumps in the road. The biggest take away for me in the project was the concept of interprofessional education (IPE). IPE involves collaborative teaching of students between health disciplines. Reflecting on my own undergraduate experience, I think about how great it would have been to prepare for my first time on a medical unit along with physiotherapy or respiratory therapy students so we could collaboratively learn together. I know it would have been a lot less stressful for me as a student if I knew how these other health professionals would fit into my patients care.

Despite the benefits of IPE it remains under utilized in healthcare education. So it is not surprising that it was a new concept to me. I found the World Health Organization has a great resource describing IPE available for free at WHO | Framework for action on interprofessional education and collaborative practice . This concept is something I have already begin implementing in my professional practice. In discussing clinical education days for nursing staff we spoke with Allied Health Team members and asked for feedback on learning needs of staff. We then offered the opportunity to these team members to participate as educators in our education days. So far the feedback from these learning sessions is great. Seeing IPE at work in the professional setting has been a great adjunct to my learning about the theme this week.

"Teaching the Teachers" and the Scholarship of Teaching in Context Relevance

Unit two Summary -Week 6 Reflection

As our discussion on context and curriculum draws to a close, I took a moment this week after my forum contributions to review the unit objectives. The class discussions spent a lot of time this week examining external influences on context relevance (hello COVID-19!) and factors that effect curriculum flexibility. In examining how philosophical perspectives effect how teaching occurs the class presented some great ideas on positive promotion of student-educator behaviours and how our implicit messaging influences our abilities to communicate.

As a general theme this unit, I found that where evidence is lacking is not in the use of tools for keeping context relevant curriculum (the flipped classroom and case based learning) but in examining how to teach the teachers these skills. There is lots of evidence evaluating these tools on the effectiveness of student learning, but not so much in how we can emphasize the use of these tools with teachers. The same issues arose when trying to examine philosophies of teacher behaviours, lots of evidence on the effectiveness of certain behaviours that teachers use with students, but little evidence on teaching these skills to the teachers. I think it all comes down to the emphasis that is placed on the scholarship of teaching.

When considering how our pedagogic philosophies influence the concept of context relevance curriculum, and what we as educators believe is important, we should also be considering how we have come to learn. In reflecting on what we know about our own teaching, we can identify opportunities for future research to identify how to "teach the teachers".

Considering Academia

Week 5 Discussion Reflection

This week we continued our class discussion surrounding the issues, challenges and responsibilities of teachers in the health discipline. I continued to challenge myself to think outside of my clinical educator experience and focus my discussion around curriculum development in nursing education and some of the challenges and issues that it presents. While I am spending a lot of time applying course content my current position in the clinical setting, I really want to take the opportunity in the discussion forums to explore academic teaching considerations. The reason for this is two fold. The first is that I tend to direct my learning towards clinical education, because that is certainly my passion and my experience. The second is that the more I learn about curriculum development, the more I realize how heavily it influences my experience with new graduate nurses and the tools that they come to the clinical setting with.

This week I looked at the concept of the flipped classroom, and how flipped classroom instruction can help to keep the curriculum context relevant without having to complete multiple levels of review and approval. The concept of the flipped classroom allows teachers to identify learning objectives for courses, that can be used from year to year, but introduce context relevance at the same time by the way in which they teach the content. Students are presented with learning that addresses core concepts before the classroom setting, then immersed in learning using tools such as simulation or case studies. Much like in the clinical setting, educators in the academic setting need to be provided with tools and the necessary flexibility to implement change when they recognize that change is needed.

In my attempts to dive further into academic applications of our discussions, I reviewed an interesting article by Roshangar et al (2020) that explored how mind mapping could be used in partnership with case-based learning in order to enhance critical thinking in nursing students. As a clinical educator, facilitating the development of critical thinking skills is always a focus of our learning. The applications of mind mapping to guide students from entry level to graduate level learning is an interesting concept that could be extended to help visualize that learning in the clinical setting after graduation.

Focusing on academic teaching is actually providing me a lot of incite into applications of clinical teaching, and one of the reasons that I am enjoying the freedom of identifying our learning objectives so far in this course!

Reference

Roshangar, F., Azar, E. F., Sarbakhsh, P., & Azarmi, R. (2020). The Effect of Case-Based Learning with or without Conceptual Mapping Method on Critical Thinking and Academic Self-Efficacy of Nursing Students. Journal of Biochemical Technology, 11(1), 37–44.