Abstract
BackgroundFaculty development is important for advancing teaching practice in health professions education. However, little is known regarding how faculty development outcomes are achieved and how change in practice may happen through these activities. In this study, we explored how clinical educators integrated educational innovations, developed within a faculty development programme, into their clinical workplaces. Thus, the study seeks to widen the understanding of how change following faculty development unfolds in clinical systems.MethodsThe study was inspired by case study design and used a longitudinal faculty development programme as a case offering an opportunity to study how participants in faculty development work with change in practice. The study applied activity theory and its concept of activity systems in a thematic analysis of focus group interviews with 14 programme attendees. Participants represented two teaching hospitals, five clinical departments and five different health professions.ResultsWe present the activity systems involved in the integration process and the contradiction that arose between them as the innovations were introduced in the workplace. The findings depict how the faculty development participants and the clinicians teaching in the workplace interacted to overcome this contradiction through iterative processes of negotiating a mandate for change, reconceptualising the innovation in response to workplace reactions, and reconciliation as temporary equilibria between the systems.ConclusionThe study depicts the complexities of how educational change is brought about in the workplace after faculty development. Based on our findings and the activity theoretical concept of knotworking, we suggest that these complex processes may be understood as collaborative knotworking between faculty development participants and workplace staff through which both the output from faculty development and the workplace practices are transformed. Increasing our awareness of these intricate processes is important for enhancing our ability to make faculty development reach its full potential in bringing educational change in practice.
Highlights
Faculty development is important for advancing teaching practice in health professions education
In this study, we set out to contribute to the understanding of change following faculty development by investigating how educational innovations developed within a longitudinal faculty development programme were integrated into clinical workplaces
For faculty development to reach its full potential in bringing about educational change, we must increase our understanding of how such change unfolds in clinical workplaces and how participants go about applying what they learn in practice
Summary
Faculty development is important for advancing teaching practice in health professions education. Little is known regarding how faculty development outcomes are achieved and how change in practice may happen through these activities. Studies have addressed the relationship between faculty development outcomes and mechanisms of change suggesting motivation, relationship building, and leadership support as some of the important mechanisms enabling, or when absent, limiting change [4, 7]. Despite these recent efforts, the burning question of how change in practice may happen following faculty development remains largely unanswered [2, 5, 7, 10]
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