Development of an entrustable professional activities (EPAs) framework for small group facilitators through a participatory design approach

Abstract

Background: Recent reports suggest that faculty development (FD) programs need a structured framework to design training and assess improvement in teaching performance of participants. Entrustable professional activities (EPAs) can serve as a novel framework to plan and conduct structured FD programs, and to assess the proficiency of small group facilitators after training. Objective: The researchers aimed to develop an EPAs framework for small group facilitators. Design: In March 2019, three workshops were organized to develop the EPAs framework by using a participatory action design approach. An orientation workshop was conducted to train the participating students and teachers. Then, a design workshop was conducted to develop the EPA framework, where data were collected from three sources: scribe notes, audio recordings, and field charts. Thematic analysis was performed, and consensus was sought from participants on the extracted professional tasks and competencies in the consensus workshop. In the third workshop, the participants also mapped professional tasks with relevant competencies. Results: A total of 15 teachers and 15 studentsf participated in the co-design process. Through a robust thematic analysis of multisource data, 57 professional tasks and 52 competencies emerged, which were converged into 11 tasks and 17 competencies after removing duplicating and non-qualifying professional tasks and competencies. Finally, a consensus was achieved on nine tasks and 12 competencies. Conclusions: The proposed EPAs framework can serve as a road map for longitudinal training and entrustment of small group facilitators. It can also guide small group facilitators in their continuous professional development and in building their teaching portfolios. ARTICLE HISTORY

WITHDRAWN: Exploring the Ethical Constructs of Dental Patients to Guide Dental Ethics Teaching

“…The central component of ethics teaching is the availability of ethics teachers, the faculty development program must orientate teacher to become better teachers and ethical role model. A participatory research has developed entrustable professional activities for medical teachers (19). There is a total of nine entrustable professional activities and twelve competencies are associated with these professional activities.…”

“…There is a total of nine entrustable professional activities and twelve competencies are associated with these professional activities. There was a hundred percent among participants on professionalism and communication skills competency (19). In a local need assessment survey related to faculty development, it was found that clinical teachers are more interested in in-patient care as compared to the basic science teacher.…”

Diversifying students-as-partners participants and practices

“…We recently conducted a study in which a framework for structured training of small group facilitators was co-created through student-teacher partnership (Iqbal et al, 2020). We involved students as equal partners in the design process because their voices are usually ignored while designing faculty development programs.…”

All stakeholders matter in faculty development

“…The gap in teacher evaluation triggers the need for a systematic evaluation system Sommer et al, 2016). Although other teacher evaluation methods, such as video recordings, pre-tests/post-tests, and faculty reports, have been tried in the past, these approaches might not be enough to generate evidence of teaching competence and teacher readiness to perform daily academic tasks proficiently Iqbal, Könings, Al-Eraky, AlSheikh, & van Merrienboer, 2020;. While exploring a potential solution to these challenges, and proposed the utility of entrustable professional activities (EPAs) to design faculty development programs and to evaluate teaching proficiency.…”

“…This project mainly focused on small group pedagogy while designing EPAs, because it is an increasingly popular pre-clinical teaching and learning instructional strategy in health professional schools worldwide. Small group pedagogy is a student-centered approach that promotes active and collaborative learning, and includes problem-based learning (PBL), teambased learning (TBL), simulation-based learning, and learning through skills lab Iqbal et al, 2020). Despite being frequently used as a teaching and learning approach, facilitating small groups sometimes becomes challenging for the teachers, especially for discipline-based program graduates with limited exposure to small group teaching and learning (Assen, Meijers, Otting, & Poell, 2016;Williams & Paltridge, 2016).…”