Teamwork in medical education: are medical students team workers?

Introduction. Despite the increasing importance of teamwork in healthcare, medical education still puts great emphasis on individual achievements. The purpose of this study is to examine medical students’ team role preferences, including the association with gender and specialty; and to provide implications for policy makers and medical educators. Methods. We used an exploratory methodology, following a repeated cross-sectional design. Data was collected from first year master students in medicine (n=2293) during five consecutive years (2016 – 2020). The Belbin Team Role Self Perception Inventory (BTRSPI) was used to measure medical students’ self-perceptions of their team role. Results. The Team Worker was the most preferred team role among medical students (35.8%), regardless of study year, gender or specialty. Female and male students had similar team role patterns, although female students scored higher on Team Worker (40.4% vs. 29.1%, p < 0.001) and Completer-Finisher (14.0% vs. 8.0%, p < 0.001). Conclusions. Our findings are encouraging due to the increased importance of interdisciplinary collaborations in healthcare. Nevertheless, policy makers and medical educators should prioritize teamwork skills at all stages (i.e. admission to residency) and levels (i.e. in the explicit and implicit curriculum) to ensure their continued development throughout the educational process.

We Are What We Read

A school of social work devised a process to assess the implicit curriculum by auditing the required readings to identify the race and gender of the authors. As a profession, we espouse a strong commitment to social justice and diversity. Yet we know that there are limitations to our objectivity and that auditing is a valuable tool that can reveal biases. The concrete data provided by an audit can help reveal and disrupt entrenched patterns. The audit was conducted by reviewing the syllabi for required BSW and MSW courses. For each text, we collected the names, gender, and race for each author. Across all programs, authors were disproportionately White as compared to the general U.S. population, professional authors, professional social workers, and students in the programs. Similarly, men were over-represented as compared to all of the benchmarks, except for the authors in the BSW program, which was more feminized as compared to the U.S. population. This assessment process adds to the existing toolset by measuring current levels of representation—including over and underrepresentation. It is hoped that auditing will prove an effective tool for doing antiracist and anti-oppressive assessment, however an audit can only reveal where work is needed.

Hidden Curriculum and School Culture as Postulates of a Better Society

When considering the role of school as the most widespread institution among all social organizations, one cannot avoid the question of its educational role in the development of each individual, but also of its function as an instance of transfer of socially desirable values. In following the sociological and pedagogical perspectives, it is necessary to ask oneself which mechanisms within the school enable the adoption of attitudes and building of the value system in children and young people, how much can be systemized, prescribed, and controlled by pedagogical experts and teachers, to what extent they are aware of the entire process, which part of it belongs to intentional education, and which part belongs to the field of the hidden, implicit curriculum, and what the role of the institution (school) culture in the formation of value patterns in the contemporary society is. This chapter explores this hidden curriculum.

Uncovering the ecology of clinical education: a dramaturgical study of informal learning in clinical teams

Off-the-job faculty development for clinical teachers has been blighted by poor attendance, unsatisfactory sustainability, and weak impact. The faculty development literature has attributed these problems to the marginalisation of the clinical teacher role in host institutions. By focusing on macro-organisational factors, faculty development is ignoring the how clinical teachers are shaped by their everyday participation in micro-organisations such as clinical teams. We set out to explore how the roles of clinical teacher and graduate learner are co-constructed in the context of everyday work in clinical teams. Using an ethnographic study design we carried out marginal participant observation of four different hospital clinical teams. We assembled a dataset comprising field notes, participant interviews, images, and video, which captured day-to-day working and learning encounters between team members. We applied the dramaturgical sensitising concepts of impression management and face work to a thematic analysis of the dataset. We found that learning in clinical teams was largely informal. Clinical teachers modelled, but rarely articulated, an implicit curriculum of norms, standards and expectations. Trainees sought to establish legitimacy and credibility for themselves by creating impressions of being able to recognise and reproduce lead clinicians’ standards. Teachers and trainees colluded in using face work strategies to sustain favourable impressions but, in so doing, diminished learning opportunities and undermined educational dialogue. These finding suggest that there is a complex interrelationship between membership of clinical teams and clinical learning. The implication for faculty development is that it needs to move beyond its current emphasis on the structuring effects of institutional context to a deeper consideration of how teacher and learner roles are co-constructed in clinical teams.

Preparing Social Workers to Confront Social Injustice and Oppression: Evaluating the Role of Social Work Education

Since the presidential election of 2016, bias-related incidents, hate-filled rhetoric, and extremist violence have been increasing in the United States. Because social workers are often working with individuals and communities affected by these incidents, practitioners may have increasing responsibility to confront social injustice and oppression. However, limited evidence on the preparedness of social workers to assume this responsibility, particularly among those who are still students, exists. To address this gap, this study used focus group and survey data from the Diversity and Oppression Scale to explore the preparedness of MSW students (N = 22) to confront oppression. Six themes were identified as integral to student experiences in their programs: (1) social worker responsibility to confront oppression, (2) use of dominant group discourse on oppression, (3) variation in faculty preparation and comfort, (4) a focus on knowledge of oppression versus skills and process, (5) role of personal responsibility and experience in student preparation, and (6) strategies to increase student preparedness to confront oppression. Factors identified to enhance students’ level of preparedness include faculty opportunities for development, changes to the explicit and implicit curriculum, and creating a formalized way to integrate topics on oppression and diversity into all facets of the curriculum.

Gender Categorizations During Group Work in Physical Education

Purpose: To explore how the use of gender categorizations inform children’s preferences of working with others in physical education. Method: Draw, write, and tell procedures were used to elicit the thoughts and feelings of 42 children, across four schools, about their peers and working together in groups. The children, aged between 11 and 13 years, were distributed across 14 focus groups to talk about conditions in group work that they thought facilitated and inhibited their learning. Results: Two meta-themes—(a) classmates and friendships and (b) work intention and trust—emerged from the interview data about their preferences for the ways groups were constituted. The results indicated that these children created or constructed categories of their peers based on gender but using gender-neutral words. Conclusion: Their constructions of working with others in PE contributed to an implicit curriculum consisting of different expectations for the same gender and for other gender groups.