Cultivating Interprofessional Facilitation Skills

Learning objectives:

• Compare and contrast facilitation of interprofessional versus uniprofessional learners
• Examine how your biases influence your interprofessional facilitation skills.
• Practice facilitation skills for application in a variety of settings, including didactic and simulation.

Discussion of how we will address the summit theme (Innovations in IPE in the classroom) and subtheme (faculty development): Strong facilitation skills are an essential component of an educator’s toolbox. Many healthcare professionals do not receive formal training on facilitating student learning. Training sessions for interprofessional activities often focus on logistics (not skills), thus facilitators learn by doing or observing others facilitate. Additionally, uni-professional facilitation differs from interprofessional facilitation in important ways. Due to implicit bias and lack of immersive knowledge of other professions, it is essential that interprofessional facilitators have strong, evidence-based facilitation skills. This active workshop will allow attendees to practice their facilitation skills via simulations of difficult-to-navigate situations that are commonly encountered in interprofessional learning environments. Furthermore, because interprofessional learning spaces need to be inclusive and equitable, the scenarios addressed by this workshop will focus on facilitating situations when a perceived hierarchy, inequity, or unconscious bias is present.

 
An outline of the seminar:

• We will highlight unconscious professional bias by asking people to write on the whiteboard what their favorite health profession is, other than their own. We will discuss how this is an unconscious bias and while it may be positive, it could negatively impact students if they are not a member of the “favored” profession. (7 min)
• Didactic component (15 min) which will cover: Teaching versus facilitation, interprofessional facilitation skills, and unconscious bias
• We will separate into breakout rooms, with each of our facilitators handling one breakout room. Our facilitators can pair up if there is a small group. (3 minutes for the logistics of entering breakout rooms)
• We will have participants “act” in simulation(s) in the breakout rooms. We will debrief in the breakout rooms. Faculty will continually model excellent facilitation skills so that learners can see them in action. (25 min)
• Large group wrap-up (2 of our facilitators will share take – aways from the small group) (10 min)

Skills and practical knowledge intended for the participants to gain include:

• Improving interprofessional facilitation skills, including skills for co-facilitating and specific techniques for working with students from other professions
• Reflecting on your implicit biases and how they influence your facilitation

Active learning strategies used within Zoom will be: polling, white board question use, breakout rooms, simulation, small-group discussion/debriefing, and large-group sharing.