Good Health Professions Education… is Hard! Coaching for positive attitudes to desirable difficulty using the Master Adaptive Learner Framework

Register here.

Join the BEI for lunch and a presentation on:
Competency-based medical education reorients health professions education from educational process metrics to patient-relevant competency outcomes. In so doing, one of the anticipated benefits is a transformation from superficial learning to deeper approaches that correlate with better patient care over the long term.
However, deeper approaches are necessarily more difficult in the short run. This has been characterized as a “desirable difficulty” in classic studies by education psychologists. The success of CBME implementation is thus dependent on the learner buying in to the longer-term benefits of what – in the short term – looks like a more difficult approach.
Workshop presenters will describe how they have engaged stakeholders (learners) in this work, using the complementary coaching and MAL models. They will explore the following challenges using the desirable difficulty lens:

•When coaching a learner, to what extent is the support designed for having the learner embrace difficulties such as productive failure, growth mindset, meta-cognition, feedback-seeking?
•Promoting adaptive expertise, the capacity to adjust to changing clinical circumstances to appropriately balance innovation and routinization, requires positioning the learner in less certain situations. When is the educational investment worth it?
•Self-regulated learning, an eventual goal for all clinicians, requires that the very support necessary to engage in desirable difficulties be withdrawn. How to reconcile this tension?
•Precision medicine reduces the friction between the learner and the data required for informed self-assessment. And yet it also requires a data-savvy learner. Is this a new desirable difficulty?

Discussion led by:

William B. Cutrer MD, MEd, FAAP
Senior Associate Dean for Undergraduate Medical Education
Associate Vice President for Educational Affairs
Vanderbilt University Medical Center

And

Martin V. Pusic, MD, PhD
Associate Professor of Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School
Senior Associate Faculty for Boston Children’s Hospital
Director, ABMS Research and Education Foundation

This will be a hybrid event, lunch will be served for in person attendees.