scholarly journals A professional knowledge base for collaborative reflection education: a qualitative description of teacher goals and strategies

Author(s):  
Marije van Braak ◽  
Mario Veen ◽  
Jean Muris ◽  
Pieter van den Berg ◽  
Esther Giroldi

Abstract Introduction For several decades, educational experts have promoted reflection as essential to professional development. In the medical setting, collaborative reflection has gained significant importance across the curriculum. Collaborative reflection has a unique edge over individual reflection, but many medical teachers find facilitating group reflection sessions challenging and there is little documentation about the didactics of teaching in such collaborative reflection settings. To address this knowledge gap, we aim to capture the professional knowledge base for facilitating collaborative reflection by analyzing the formal and perceived goals and strategies of this practice. Methods The professional knowledge base consists of formal curricular materials as well as individual teacher expertise. Using Template Analysis, we analyzed the goals and strategies of collaborative reflection reported in institutional training documents and video-stimulated interviews with individual teachers across all Dutch general practitioner training institutes. Results The analysis resulted in a highly diverse overview of educational goals for residents during the sessions, teacher goals that contribute to those educational goals, and a myriad of situation-specific teacher strategies to accomplish both types of goals. Teachers reported that the main educational goal was for residents to learn and develop and that the teachers’ main goal was to facilitate learning and development by ensuring everyone’s participation in reflection. Key teacher strategies to that end were to manage participation, to ensure a safe learning environment, and to create conditions for learning. Discussion The variety of strategies and goals that constitute the professional knowledge base for facilitating collaborative reflection in postgraduate medical education shows how diverse and situation-dependent such facilitation can be. Our analysis identifies a repertoire of tools that both novice and experienced teachers can use to develop their professional skill in facilitating collaborative reflection.

2014 ◽  
pp. 1909-1927
Author(s):  
Agnes K. Bradshaw

By design or not, most librarians restrict their professional organization involvement to professional librarian organizations. Limiting professional involvement to only library related organizations will not provide the depth of professional knowledge that today's librarian needs to have in order to keep up with the requirements of the profession. Library budgets and funding have been slashed due to economic downturns, and patrons are turning to libraries for assistance with a variety of concerns that libraries did not have to address in previous times. Reaching beyond the scope of the profession, librarians can broaden their knowledge base and use that broader knowledge base to benefit their patrons and communities.


1986 ◽  
Vol 79 (10) ◽  
pp. 568-574 ◽  
Author(s):  
A H Crisp

Communication is a major aspect of medical practice in such areas as the consultation, counselling, team work, management duties, health education and teaching. Many communication skills essential to the clinical consultation are different from those used in everyday life. They require an understanding of the doctor/patient relationship and of the self as well as of others. They also require a subserving repertoire of specific behavioural skills. The present paper sets out to emphasize this pervasive importance of communication skills in medical practice and to suggest some educational goals and objectives for those skills of particular relevance to the consultation. It describes one attempt to pursue these within the author's own school despite the piecemeal nature of such teaching. In Britain great emphasis is placed on the importance of clinical skills and this is reflected in the priority given to them in the final professional examination, and yet their communication aspects are rarely well defined within the curriculum or directly assessed. The author advocates the teaching and assessment of communication skills as a continuous process throughout undergraduate and postgraduate medical education for clinical practice.


Author(s):  
Agnes K. Bradshaw

By design or not, most librarians restrict their professional organization involvement to professional librarian organizations. Limiting professional involvement to only library related organizations will not provide the depth of professional knowledge that today’s librarian needs to have in order to keep up with the requirements of the profession. Library budgets and funding have been slashed due to economic downturns, and patrons are turning to libraries for assistance with a variety of concerns that libraries did not have to address in previous times. Reaching beyond the scope of the profession, librarians can broaden their knowledge base and use that broader knowledge base to benefit their patrons and communities.


2018 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 238-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jinfa Cai ◽  
Anne Morris ◽  
Charles Hohensee ◽  
Stephen Hwang ◽  
Victoria Robison ◽  
...  

In our March editorial (Cai et al., 2018), we considered the problem of isolation in the work of teachers and researchers. In particular, we proposed ways to take advantage of emerging technological resources, such as online archives of student data linked to instructional activities and indexed by learning goals, to produce a professional knowledge base (Cai et al., 2017b, 2018). This proposal would refashion our conceptions of the nature and collection of data so that teachers, researchers, and teacher-researcher partnerships could benefit from the accumulated learning of ordinarily isolated groups. Although we have discussed the general parameters for such a system in previous editorials, in this editorial, we present a potential mechanism for accumulating learning into a professional knowledge base, a mechanism that involves collaboration between multiple teacher-researcher partnerships. To illustrate our ideas, we return once again to the collaboration between fourth-grade teacher Mr. Lovemath and mathematics education researcher Ms. Research, who are mentioned in our previous editorials(Cai et al., 2017a, 2017b).


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