Education Bites

Tuesday 11 Feb 2025,

12.30 - 13.30,

MTC 109/11.

What is compassion training and why do students need it?

Kate Owen & Louise Dunford

We will share some early findings which show worryingly high levels of stress, burnout & depression in our 3rd year medical students; explain some of the theory and evidence behind compassion training for health care professionals; share some early quantitative results suggesting benefits and also some of the qualitative findings which give an insight into why this might be.

Thursday 13 March,

12.30-13.30,

Beehive Clinical Skills LabLink opens in a new window.

Involving patients in your teaching: how to get started.

Lindsay Muscroft and the MBChB Clinical Skills Team.

We will hear from the clinical skills team about how they have involved patients in their teaching sessions, and we will hear from some patients about their experiences of getting involved. The session will close with some advice about how to get started if you would like to involve some patients in your teaching going forwards.

(Please note this replaces the session previously planned for Tuesday 11 March.)

Thursday 3 April,

12.30 - 13.30,

A042.

Exploring the Inclusive Education Hub – Your Toolkit for Change.

Emily Róisín Reid and Sean Barrett.

We will introduce the Inclusive Education Hub - a co-created resource designed to support educators and those who facilitate learning in embedding inclusive practices more effectively.

This practical, solutions-focused session will provide an opportunity to:

✅ Reflect on how your role is so important in supporting inclusion, by connecting to an overview of Inclusive Education in the broader HE landscape.

✅ Explore the WMS Inclusive Education Hub’s checklists, tools and resources.

✅ (If we are up for it!) Experiment with AI on the topic of inclusive education as relevant to your role and your work with students.

✅ Take away a few actions for further developing our inclusive practice over the next year.

Why attend?

In an increasingly diverse and dynamic educational landscape, making sure our teaching and learning environments are inclusive and supportive for our learners is really important, but it isn’t always clear what individuals can do. This session is designed to provide you with immediately actionable next steps, with small steps you can take to more equitable and student-centred learning environments.

This session is open to all educators, research supervisors, leaders and those who support student learning across WMS. Basically, everyone! Whether you are new to inclusive education or seeking to take more advanced steps, this session will provide a structured space to engage, reflect, and take tangible steps forward.

Tuesday 15 April,

12.30 - 13.30,

MSB A0.41

Visiting speaker: Game based learning in health care education.

Dr Cameron Gosling, Monash University.

Students in the bachelor of Paramedicine complete a foundation unit title Paramedicine in the Australian health care system. The unit delivers a structured introduction to public health and the Australian healthcare system. This introduction addresses contemporary public health principles and practices including key concepts such as population health, social determinants of health, and the core roles and functions of public health systems, policies and programs.

Students undertaking this unit often find difficulties understanding and applying funding models to real life situations. Poor formal student feedback evaluations are common in this unit, with qualitative comments including statements around content being dry, boring, and not reflective of current paramedic practice. The combination of these factors led to a revision in some teaching approaches.

The teaching team introduced the “Healthcare funding and ethics” game, to facilitate discussions on how funding models work within the Australian context, allowing debate on how ethical decisions are made.

This presentation will cover key lessons learned, inherent biases identified and the process of publication of findings. As part of the presentation approaches to education research and publication will be discussed.

Cameron Gosling has been an academic member of staff with the Monash University, Department of Paramedicine since 2016. Previously he has held roles as a Research Fellow at Monash University with the Department of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine based at the Alfred Hospital (2009-2013) and the Department of Physiotherapy (2013-2016). His research training was primarily in injury epidemiology.

Cameron is currently a senior lecturer and Higher Degrees Research Coordinator in the Department of Paramedicine. He has previously held the position of Course Director for the Bachelor of Paramedicine (2019-2024). His research focus has included injury epidemiology, in particular investigating sports, workplace and traumatic injuries and paramedic education and practice. He has experience applying quantitative and qualitative methodologies across varied projects in paramedicine.

Thursday 8 May,

12.30 - 13.30,

Beehive Clinical Skills LabLink opens in a new window.

‘Buddy-up Facilitation’: empowering students and facilitators.

Dr Raghu Adya & Colleagues

Co-facilitation is an innovative learning/facilitation approach which involves two or more faculty members facilitating a small group cohort.

This has gained popularity in recent years in engineering, business management, humanities, and basic sciences. In the context of medical education and more specifically Case-Based Learning (CBL) it remains relatively unexplored.

Practical advantages of this method include:

• Facilitators can role-model their collaborative skills which are based on trust, openness, respect, and information sharing.
• Co-facilitators can create rich learning environments by synchronizing their differing domains of knowledge/expertise and facilitation styles.
• In meeting diverse student needs, facilitators can employ their distinct professional knowledge, expertise, perceptions, competencies, and facilitation techniques/styles.
• Real-time observation, reflection and sharing of facilitation experiences can enhance facilitator professional development.

We sought to explore this in our Phase-3 CBL sessions with a combined facilitation of a non-clinical and clinical member of our facilitator team.

To prepare the facilitators for this ‘Buddy-up facilitation’ session we adapted published guidelines (Co-facilitation Guidelines: McGill University, Canada):

• Pre-session preparation:
• Facilitators were encouraged to reflect on their facilitation style, identify their strengths, weak spots and how do they plan to complement their co-facilitator skills.
• Facilitators met before the CBL session and discussed their plans, agreed on areas for observation, receiving and giving feedback.

During session:

Facilitators were encouraged to support each other and complement areas which needed addressing during the session.

Post-session:

Facilitators were encouraged to debrief each other on agreed areas of observation, feedback and newly identified areas which needed further thought.

During our session on the 8th of May, we will have three presentations on ‘educational theories of co-facilitation’, ‘Perspectives and reflections of co-facilitators’ and ‘student feedback’.

Tuesday 27 May,

12.30 - 13.30,

MTC 109/11.

Pathways to agency; what can we learn through building belonging?

Cath Fenn and member(s) of MB ChB Digital education Interns team.

Co-creation can play an influential role in student’s and staff’s sense of belonging and thriving within, and beyond, Higher Education1. Successful co-creation projects can lead to transformative, creative, and innovative outcomes. The HEA framework for partnership2 has guided us well over the past decade with positive outcomes reported by co-creator teams including a sense of belonging, sense of agency and the feeling of staying grounded.

We know there is no-one-size-fits-all approach, and success will always depend on understanding students, staff, and their needs in your area of practice. It feels like we all start out on projects with good intentions, frameworks in place and enthusiasm in abundance. Developing the higher level of understanding required to make the more innovative and potentially impactful projects stick and grow can be hard. Power dynamics become more exposed!

Belonging is supported by creating a welcoming environment where everyone feels valued and included, built on a foundation of trust. We've been exploring the development of a building belonging framework to help dive more deeply into defining the core components of building belonging. This framework draws on these four elements- inclusion, mattering, empowerment, and connection, acknowledging that each are connected by an enabling factor; trust.

Challenges are linked to relevant principles of Self Determination Theory, Positioning Theory, and theory on Psychological Safety, to provide direction and fundamental reasons for implementation of co-creation.3 Can the development and application of a building belonging framework help us all tackle the challenges to maintaining trust, that sometimes-elusive enabling factor?

What is the Warwick building belonging framework?

Find out more by attending a Building Belonging4 Webinar (with Q&A) register here for 11:00-12:00 Friday 2 May 2025 - The purpose of this webinar is to share with you the work and resources being developed by the WIHEA Building Belonging Learning Circle.

References:

1.Lubicz-Nawrocka, T., & Bovill, C. (2021). Do students experience transformation through co-creating curriculum in higher education? Teaching in Higher Education, 28(7), 1744–1760. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2021.1928060

2.Healey, Mick & Flint, Abbi & Harrington, Kathy. (2014). Framework for partnership in learning and teaching in higher education.

3.Karen D. Könings, Serge Mordang, Frank Smeenk, Laurents Stassen & Subha Ramani (2021) Learner involvement in the co-creation of teaching and learning: AMEE Guide No. 138, Medical Teacher, 43:8, 924-936, DOI: 10.1080/0142159X.2020.1838464

4.I. Hide-Wright, T. Ritchie, L. Mencarini, and A. Alcock, "Warwick Belonging Framework," University of Warwick, 2024. [Online]. Available: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/academy/activities/learningcircles/belonging-framework/

Thursday 12 June,

12.30 - 13.30,

MTC 004/6.

Tuesday 17 June,

13.00 - 14.00,

MTC 109/11.

Video Vignettes in Medical Education: Fostering Empathy and Moral Sensitivity

Simon Jenkins & Tom Paddock

Small group teaching is the backbone of ethics and law learning, and we traditionally provide students with written cases to analyse and discuss. I’ve recently been exploring the possibility of using short video vignettes instead of written cases, to more realistically represent how clinicians encounter ethical cases in practice, to better engage students’ empathy, and to develop their ability to identify moral problems for themselves. In this session, we’ll watch the prototype video vignette and discuss the benefits and disadvantages of using it, as well as the possibility of integrating video vignettes across different themes in the MBChB curriculum.

Friday 27 June.