Faculty Development as an Instrument of Change: A Case Study on Teaching Professionalism

Abstract

Faculty development includes those activities that are designed to renew or assist faculty in their different roles. As such, it encompasses a wide variety of interventions to help individual faculty members improve their skills. However, it can also be used as a tool to engage faculty in the process of institutional change. The Faculty of Medicine at McGill University determined that such a change was necessary to effectively teach and evaluate professionalism at the undergraduate level, and a faculty development program on professionalism helped to bring about the desired curricular change. The authors describe that program to illustrate how faculty development can serve as a useful instrument in the process of change. The ongoing program, established in 1997, consists of medical education rounds and "think tanks" to promote faculty consensus and buy-in, and diverse faculty-wide and departmental workshops to convey core content, examine teaching and evaluation strategies, and promote reflection and self-awareness. To analyze the approach used and the results achieved, the authors applied a well-known model by J.P. Kotter for implementing change that consists of the following phases: establishing a sense of urgency, forming a powerful guiding coalition, creating a vision, communicating the vision, empowering others to act on the vision, generating short-term wins, consolidating gains and producing more change, and anchoring new approaches in the culture. The authors hope that their school's experience will be useful to others who seek institutional change via faculty development.

Impact of an Academic–Community Partnership in Medical Education on Community Health: Evaluation of a Novel Student-Based Home Visitation Program

“…Successful behavioral and social science teaching requires a cadre of well-trained, reflective scientists and clinicians who are supported by their institution (67,68). Ideally, clinically experienced behavioral and social sciences scientists and behavioral and social sciences-trained physicians and other health care professionals will create interdisciplinary and interdepartmental teams to achieve this mission.…”

Faculty Development Initiatives to Advance Research Literacy and Evidence-Based Practice at CAM Academic Institutions

“…One strategy used by all grantees was to develop and adopt research literacy and EBP competencies for their programs. The creation of these competencies at the individual institutional levels served as a ''shared vision'' for both faculty development 6 and other grant-related efforts promoting EBP. Overall, there was general agreement across grantee institutions in terms of required competencies that focused on research literacy and EBP.…”

“…5 Preparing students to practice healthcare from an evidencebased perspective depends largely on the ability of faculty to teach research literacy and model EBP in clinical training. Successful faculty development programs can be a powerful tool for engaging faculty in making important changes to learning environments, [6][7][8] such as those required to integrate EBP. Current perspectives on faculty development in medical education include the need to ground it in a theoretical framework, to provide structured activities to support collaborative learning and knowledge sharing, and to promote scholarship.…”

The Compass Model to plan faculty development programs

“…Activities in this quadrant add considerable value to the institution's teaching and learning, research and administration quality. Further elaboration of each direction and quadrant can be found in Figure 2, [20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35] which draws on reported trends and best practices in faculty development. Unlike Kolb's experiential learning model, 36 there is no sequential relationship between directions or quadrants in our model and should therefore not be viewed as a cycle.…”