In this session, experience and walk away with an engaged learning tool that you can employ immediately in teaching and training that helps build compassion and empathy, and can be employed to heighten learner awareness of the power of words and interactions in the building of teams. The two distinct tools you will experience and then take home with you are simple and effective, as well as easy to use. You can adapt this design to teach other topic areas, as well! Watch the method modeled, interactive with others to test your own assumptions, and learn in this low-risk environment!
Teaching and learning is not simply about the transfer and acquisition of knowledge or intellectual reflection. All information has some sort of context, and that realization is imperative in the teaching of critical thinking. Helping learners to discover and value that context can be challenging, however, particularly if it is embedded within or affected by cultural assumptions and implicit biases.
In this workshop, simple learning activities are utilized to spotlight those assumptions and biases, which are often highly nuanced, leaving the learner unaware of their presence. The synergogy for this workshop is that learners will learn from learners and teams from teams by the sharing of common experiences in which nobody has an inherent advantage, and where risk and consequence are mitigated. In other words, by its design, the workshop leads participants to examine their own belief systems without putting them into awkward scenarios where personal knowledge deficits are exposed. This technique utilizes naïve tasks for which one cannot be fully prepared and generates a safer, low-risk learning environment. Additionally, the tools themselves are low-barrier and low-resource, meaning they can be used in a variety of situations where learners may have different needs and experiences. This tool addresses many of the objectives of Universal Design for Learning and can be locally generated with a computer and a printer.
Working in small groups, learners manipulate specialized cards into categories relating to causes and consequences of two topic areas: social determinants of health and teamwork. The two topic areas are taught to demonstrate the flexibility of the tool and inspire learners to consider other applications they might generate and use in their own learning environments. The decks of cards will, by the end of the workshop, not only be familiar, but will be given to participants to take home. Participants will leave this workshop not only with the knowledge of a tool to use, but the tool itself. Additionally, each participant will be provided teaching plans of the two workshop activities that include measurable behavioral objectives, instructions for variations in play. This information will be mapped to Bloom’s taxonomy, and where it is applicable, to TeamSTEPPS domains and skills and the Interprofessional Educational Collaborative (IPEC) competencies.
This workshop will be interactive. Individuals will have time to prepare themselves before sharing their information with partners, other team members, and finally, with the larger group. The large group interactions will include facilitated learning debriefs conducted by experienced educators, who model the instructional synergogy. Learners will also be able to capture debriefing questions and ideas for adapting both the mechanics of this tool and its instructional operations for other topic areas.
As a result of participating in this program, learners should be able to:
1) Inspect and experiment with a simple, reproducible teaching aid in the form of card decks, and
2) Formulate and propose potential alternatives for use of such tools to teach complex and nuanced topics, and
3) Assess and evaluate effectiveness of the teaching methodology in learning about social determinants of health and behaviors related to teamwork.
Time usage will be distributed during this 90 minute presentation as closely as possible to this schema:
7-10 minutes Settling learners into the room, introductions
5 minutes Explanation of the synergogy they are about to see demonstrated
20 minutes Social Determinants of Health Cause and Sequence activity
10 minutes Debriefing activity, including insights gained
15 minutes Team Behaviors Cause and Sequence activity
10 minutes Debriefing activity, including insights gained.
10 minutes Small group discussions with teams related to other applications
10 minutes Questions and answers sharing of additional free resources