Impact of faculty development programs for positive behavioural changes among teachers: a case study

Abstract

PurposeFaculty development (FD) is essential to prepare faculty members to become effective teachers to meet the challenges in medical education. Despite the growth of FD programmes, most evaluations were often conducted using short questionnaires to assess participants’ satisfaction immediately after they attended a programme. Consequently, there were calls for more rigorous evaluations based on observed changes in participants’ behaviours. Hence, this study aims to explore how the FD workshops run by the Centre for Medical Education, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore have impacted behavioural changes in the educators.MethodsWe followed up with the educators at least half a year after they have attended the workshops. With limited literature as reference, we initiated a small-scale case-study research design involving semi-structured interviews with six educators which was triangulated with three focus group discussions with their students. This allowed us to explore behavioural changes among the educators as well as evaluate the feasibility of this research methodology.ResultsWe identified three emerging categories among the educators: ignorance to awareness, from intuition to confirmation and expansion, and from individualism to community of practice.ConclusionAlthough FD have placed much emphasis on teaching and learning approaches, we found that the teacher-student interaction or human character components (passionate, willing to sacrifice, are open to feedback) in becoming a good educator are lacking in our FD workshops.

Evaluation of teachers training workshop at Kirkpatrick level 1 using retro–pre questionnaire

“…It is anticipated that the positive self-reported perceived confidence may motivate teachers and bring positive behavioral changes among them for teaching learning, educating the students, and assessing their performance. 10 …”

“…The rationale of the study was as follows: 1) participants’ reactions, perception, and self-confidence can usually be measured with retro–pre questionnaire immediately after the training program, and 2) it is believed that the positive self-reported perceived confidence may motivate teachers and bring positive behavioral changes among them for teaching learning, educating the students, and assessing their performance. 9 , 10 …”

Favourable influence of revised basic course workshops in medical educational technology on knowledge of teaching learning and assessment methods of participants

“…However the years of professional experience varied and since repeated or continuous exposure or self -learning cannot be stopped, this is a common confounding factor in all such studies. Taking a student's feedback, whether they benefit, do faculty teach better, use more skills and perform better and ultimately how this benefits the society at large, is the future scope of this study and a recent study has shown that students want passionate teachers, willing to sacrifice and open to feedback (Lee et al, 2018). In this endeavour, the faculty development programs should be need based, flexible and global in their approach, their content should be related to relevant problems and specific objectives and they should develop from a teachers' training to a professional's development program (Bansal & Supe, 2007;Adkoli & Sood, 2009).…”

Identification of capacity development indicators for faculty development programs: A nominal group technique study

“…Some studies have explored learning, which included attitudinal changes and increases in knowledge or skills [9][10][11]. A few studies have assessed the changes in educational behavior of the participants in their multiple roles [12,13]. Most of these evaluations have also only had a focus on short term outcomes, especially at an individual level.…”