Welcome everyone to The PAPERs Podcast. For those who don't remember, PAPERs is an acronym for Professional and Academics, Parsing, Education, Research. It's Linda here in case you haven't figured it out. And I get to do this by myself without John or Lara or Jason. This is exciting. But I'm missing the Lara Ready. Today I'm going to do a consult. I hesitate to call it a methods consult nor is it a theory consult and it really can't live up to Lara's methods or theories consults.
Let's just call it a consult. The model that I'll be speaking about is about faculty development called staff development in some parts of the world. Specifically, I'll be talking about faculty development approaches delivery methods or initiatives. It has been called the four quadrant model. The idea originated with my friend and colleague, Yvonne Steinert, at McGill University. It's not a new idea. Yvonne has been talking about it for over 15 years.
And it's certainly evolved over time. I'll be talking about the four quadrant model from the perspective of the faculty developer and later on from the perspective of the user or the faculty member. I first heard about it when it was presented at the first faculty development conference about 2011. It was published in a paper in medical teacher in 2010. The paper was called faculty development from workshops to communities of practice by Yvonne Steinert.
And it was expanded on in the excellent book faculty development in the health professions in 2014. By the way, this really is an excellent book. It gives a broad overview of faculty development. A new edition is coming out in late 2024. I'll leave these references for you on the website. Let's go back to the model. In the old days, most of us as faculty members participated in factive workshops or seminars.
These were one time face-to-face activities often held at a central place and most of it addressed something that was good for a group and for the organization. A few of us may have participated in longitudinal programs, fellowships, graduate degrees, teaching scholars programs and the like. These are formal, structured, planned and delivered to groups of people. Most were related to the content area of teaching and learning and not to our other academic roles and activities as faculty members.
These days, faculty development has expanded the scope of content to include other faculty roles such as leadership, career development, scholarship, research. But now we're going to be talking not so much about the content but about the approach. Evon proposed that we think of faculty development initiatives like a 2x2 table.
On one axis, the context for learning with the dimension ranging from individual or independent experiences to group or collective learning on the other axis is the faculty development approach, ranging from informal approaches to more formal ones. So as you see, we end up with four quadrants, formal group initiatives, formal individual initiatives, informal group initiatives and informal individual ones.
There's also mentorship which doesn't seem to fit into one quadrant and has been placed in the middle crossing all four. So we go into a bit of detail on each formal group initiatives are probably the most familiar to us and the most commonly used. They include workshop seminars, rounds and other short sessions which often incorporate multiple teaching formats aimed at the goal of the activity and including active learning.
So formal group initiatives have the advantage in that they are flexible. They can be modular, they can be repeated as needed and they can be repeated in different context. The two little programs also in this category include fellowships, graduate degrees and teaching scholar programs. They may be done by individuals but the organization of the learning is generally done for a group and part of the learning might be in a group format.
These longitudinal programs take more time for the faculty member but it allows them to dive deeply into the content and gain more expertise, often with a view to a change in career focus.
Moving to the next quadrant, formal individual initiatives, these include online learning, peer coaching and peer and student feedback. These are planned and structured either programs like online learning or official initiatives like matching faculty members for feedback and providing instruction on how to provide that feedback. Or ensuring that student evaluations are part of annual reviews and providing time for reflection, sometimes guided reflection on the student evaluations.
The third quadrant is informal individual activities. I hesitate to call these ones initiatives because they're not planned. These are basically learning by experience, including learning by observing for instance role models when co-teaching with a colleague and learning by doing. In both cases, by reflecting on experience, the self-assessment of teaching can be facilitated by self-assessment frameworks or questionnaires to provide a structure or set of competencies for the reflection.
The fourth quadrant is informal group initiatives and this includes work-based learning and communities of practice. Most of us are familiar with work-based learning as an important component of clinical or experiential learning for students and residents. But informal learning in the place we work is important for us as well as we teach, lead or take part in our other faculty roles at work. We can reflect on these work experiences as learning experiences.
And as an individual faculty and groups of faculty become members of a teaching community with colleague or for that matter a research community or a leadership community, they may learn to be a better teacher, researcher or leader. Ivan Steinert places mentorship at the center of the four quadrants crossing over to all four because I quote here,
any strategy for self-improvement can benefit from the support and challenge that an effective mentor can provide. So those that are the four quadrants with mentorship in the middle, I have a couple of observations about this. One, there is some crossover from where Ivan originally assigned the initiatives into quadrants. For instance, online learning can certainly be done in groups as well as individually with group interaction synchronously or asynchronously.
Pure feedback can be ad hoc, thus formal as well as inform and learning from experience is placed in the individual quadrant and work based learning in the group quadrant. But to me, they are both kinds of experiential learning and where does learning using social media go?
Perhaps informal group or informal individual, I leave it up to you listeners to help us figure that one out. So that's the model. How can we use it faculty development providers already provide many activities in the formal quadrants, both group and individual.
And they should explore ways of enhancing the informal ways that colleagues learn this me start with trying to maximize experiential learning opportunities for other promoting reflection, perhaps using a framework for best practices, recognizing role models and ensuring that informal learning experiences are recognized and valued by the organization.
On that latter topic of recognizing learning that is done informally continuing professional development clinical providers have an approach to work based informal learning that we can learn from as faculty development is a subset of CPD. As clinician educators, we are often involved in delivering faculty development initiatives formal ones, as well as informally providing guidance and feedback to individuals or groups of colleagues in our workplace.
We could be at the forefront of modeling how to learn from the breadth of faculty development initiatives and approaches. And what about individual faculty members who I hope will continue to learn I think we should start to think beyond getting our faculty development at the occasional half day workshop building reflection into our teaching looking at role models, chatting with colleagues about way to improve and trying it out.
Those are all things that we can do as individuals that will help our faculty development. Just before we end, I have another observation I think with no evidence to back it up just observation that the relative amount of learning or participation in each quadrant changes over a faculty members career and may also change with context.
For instance, I suspect that new faculty members take advantage of structured formal programs, whereas more senior faculty members may use more informal individual activities that align with their context and roles. That would be a great research project for someone. Any takers? I'd be happy to work with someone. So that's it. A consultation on Steiner's for quadrant model of faculty development and how it can be used to get you thinking about faculty development.
The references are on the podcast site at paperspodcast.com. Let the papers team know if you can use this model or what you think of it. You can reach us at paperspodcast.com at Gmail. So until our next podcast, bye bye. You've been listening to the papers podcast. We hope you made you just slightly smarter. Podcast is a production of the unit for teaching and learning at the Carolinska Institute. The executive producer today was my friend Teresa Saurov.
The executive producer today was Samuel Lundberg. You can learn more about the papers podcast and contact us at www.thebaperspodcast.com. Thank you for listening everybody and thank you for all you do. Take care.