Signature Pedagogy and Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice: Is There One?

• In Event: Hilton Roundtable Session 1
  In Roundtable Session: Exploring Signature Pedagogies and Pedagogies of Practice: Implications for Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Practice

Abstract

Purpose:
Teamwork and collaboration are rapidly becoming the hallmarks of the changing landscape in the US health care system. Effective team care delivery models are linked to patient care quality and value priorities, as well as preparation for anticipated workforce needs. 11,12,29 Educating an interprofessional workforce may require an understanding and integration of multiple professions’ signature pedagogies as well as insight into what are the elements for interprofessional pedagogies of practice for the team. Examination of one profession’s (physical therapy) student perspectives on the activities that constitute interprofessional learning experiences offers insight into potential attributes that may be part of an interprofessional signature pedagogy.

Perspectives/Theoretical Framework:
Grossman’s pedagogies of practice10: representations of practice, decompositions of practice, and approximations of practice provide a conceptual framework for exploring physical therapy student perceptions of interprofessional education in the various clinical practice settings.

Methods: This qualitative study explored entry-level doctorate physical therapy students’ interprofessional experiences during an 8-week clinical clerkship.30 First, we explored the different ways that interprofessional practice is represented and the ways these representations are visible to novices. Second, we described the decompositions of interprofessional practice by breaking down practice into its constituent parts for the purpose of teaching and learning. And lastly, we explored the approximations of interprofessional practice, the opportunities to engage in practices that are more or less proximal to the practices of a profession.

Results:
1) Representation of practice: We examined the nature (specific interprofessional activities described by learners) and the structure of the interprofessional learning and was categorized as informal, implicit, on-the-fly teaching.
2) Decompositions of practice: through the nature of the interprofessional learning and the timing of the experience (synchronous and asynchronous).
3) Approximations of practice through the examination of the context which this work occurred in the clinical setting for both inpatient (acute care, acute rehabilitation, and skilled nursing facilities) and the outpatient settings (private practice and outpatient, hospital-based practice).


Conclusions:

Interprofessional educators attempt to work across professional boundaries to address the collaborative competencies. Often these cross-profession discussions reveal striking differences in assumptions, priorities, power, traditions, and beliefs about what constitutes good pedagogy and appropriate outcomes. One primary area of concern from our study is the consistency in which the interprofessional education learning occurred implicitly, informally, and spontaneously (in-the-moment).30 This implicit pedagogy could potentially exploit and encourage disruptive assumptions, hierarchies, and power differentials amongst the professions. Despite significant forward movement in defining expectations for IPE, we still lack a clearly articulated, agreed upon conceptual model describing exemplars or an underlying interprofessional signature pedagogy of those teams which have been successful. Doing so would help to create a more explicit and agnostic approach to interprofessional education.

Significance:

Conceptualizing an interprofessional collaborative care signature pedagogy may help guide faculty and clinical instructor development, in order to facilitate more explicit and intentional learning, when capitalizing on teachable moments in interprofessional education and collaborative practice Ultimately this could impact the relational connectedness aspect within the interprofessional team, including improvement in both education, patient care, and health outcomes.

Authors

• Amber Fitzsimmons, University of California - San Francisco

• Gail M. Jensen, Creighton University