Faculty Development Workshop

Training on how to use the QARRD was completed in a 1-hour, interprofessional workshop (Appendix C) for health professions faculty. This workshop oriented participants to critical thinking and taught them how to ask higher-order clinical questions with the Bloom's and elaboration questioning strategies. The workshop facilitators (Russell W. Farmer, Staci Saner, and Gerard Rabalais) included faculty development educators and physicians. Workshop content was developed to be appropriate for all types of health professions educators who interact with learners in clinical settings.

The workshop used a combination of didactic and practice-based instructional activities detailed in the facilitator guide (Appendix D). First, participants were introduced to learning theory and learning domains including Bloom's taxonomy. Participants were then asked to describe typical discussions that they have with students in clinical settings and barriers they face to clinical instruction. Next, the workshop facilitators described methods to strengthen question and discussion strategies to promote higher-order thinking from learners in clinical settings. For example, rather than asking a learner to list the symptoms of a disease presentation (a lower-level recall question), an instructor could instead ask the learner to contrast the disease presentation of the present patient with a hypothetical patient having different risk factors (a higher-level analysis question). We next gave each participant a copy of the QARRD (Appendix A), and participants observed a role-play demonstration of how to implement the QARRD for clinical instruction. Finally, participants practiced using the tool in pairs/small groups with various role-play activities that required constructing discussion prompts on their own. To adapt to the COVID-19 crisis, many of our more recent versions of this workshop have been given over teleconference and suggested modifications for this format are also included in the facilitator guide.