Faculty Development: Building a Culture of Excellence in a Multi-Specialty Physical Therapy Residency Faculty
Purpose:
Describe the process of developing and implementing a multi-specialty physical therapy residency faculty retreat and discuss the agenda and outcomes developed through group reflection for the future program direction: didactic, clinical mentoring and educational research.
Methods/Description:
The University of XXX, Department of Physical Therapy has a history of strong commitment to professional and post-professional physical therapist education. Our involvement in residency education has continued to grow over the past 14 years and we now offer programs in six specialty areas: Geriatrics (2004), Pediatrics (2013), Orthopedics (2014), Sport (2018), Neurology (2019), and Cardiac & Pulmonary (developing).
Ongoing didactic and clinical program faculty development is a targeted area of focus of our residency program administration. Clinical mentors and didactic faculty are required to participate in two, full-day workshops: one in clinical mentoring, and the second in didactic teaching/learning. after which they are provided with formative and summative informal and formal reviews by the Program Director or Coordinator, and the Residents.
A day long residency program - wide faculty retreat was organized with the following objectives: • Provide an opportunity to develop a culture of excellence within the residency program through shared experiences and vision.
• Develop strategies to facilitate clinical reasoning in the classroom AND during a mentoring session.
• Describe methods to benchmark resident knowledge (e.g., case based, multiple choice questions) and skill performance. (e.g., Live Patient Examination, Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE)).
• Brainstorm to develop a residency research agenda unique to the University of XX.
The program agenda included a key note speech, a panel discussion to set the stage for the closing reflection activity, and four presentations. The presentations focused on theory, strategies/techniques to develop clinical reasoning skills in residents, and development of both written and observational assessment tools to evaluate resident knowledge and skill performance. Following each presentation, participants worked in small groups to complete guided, structured activities to reinforce the topic in the context of their specialty area or the UM residency programs. The small groups then shared their products with the entire group led by the retreat facilitators.
Results/Outcomes:
40 faculty (78% of the entire faculty) participated in the retreat. Faculty from all six of the residency programs were involved in discussion and activities related to the course content. Feedback from the retreat was overwhelmingly positive. Faculty commented that they found content related to research in residency education, development of core competencies and entrustable professional activities for residency education, developing OSCE style examinations and essay type questions, and facilitating clinical reasoning in the classroom most useful. Participants identified topics to be discussed in future retreats such as mentoring the mentor, time management, residency and mentor productivity, and implementation of educational research.
Conclusions/Relevance to the conference theme:
A residency faculty development plan which includes targeted training and collaborative learning across residency specialty areas in the format of a residency faculty retreat is one strategy to foster excellence in residency education. Future research to assess the effectiveness of the activities included in this retreat in improving faculty confidence and skills in mentoring and didactic teaching is warranted.