Presented Oct 2018 to a group of subspecialty fellowship coordinators. The goal of the presentation was to explain what Emotional Intelligence is and how it ties in with our communication styles (we had recently taken the DISC assessment).
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In 2018, the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) changed a section of the Common Program Requirements. This presentation was given to a group of coordinators studying for a national certificate for Program Coordinators in Graduate Medical Education and focused on Resident Work Hours.
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What was the most challenging part of this course for you personally?
Honestly? Getting started. I suspect a combination of burnout from the first half of the semester (course involving the service learning project) and a distaste for the textbook: walls of text, heading levels that weren’t used the same, and pixelated images. Once I got past the presentation of the information, I was able to do more, but still had difficulty reading it. (Edit to add: I had a pdf / ebook version of the textbook. The print version was reportedly better.)
What was the most rewarding part of this course for you personally?
Finishing? Kidding. Mostly. Probably reading the case studies, deciding what I would do, then reading the solutions and spotting areas in which they did what I would’ve done. Of course, they also did things I hadn’t thought of, which is why I’m here. 🙂
What was the most interesting thing you learned in this course that you will take with you as you move into the IDD field?
The realization that formative and summative evaluations in IDD don’t mean the same thing in Graduate Medical Education (GME). Or at least it’s a stretch to tie the two together. In GME, evaluations done on learners throughout their training are the formative evaluations (helps inFORM what areas we need to address) and the final evaluation, which evaluates their progress over the duration of their training, is the summative (a summation of their training progress). In IDD, formative evaluation takes place during an intervention to gauge whether or not it’s accomplishing what we intended it to accomplish. I can tie that easily into GME’s formative – is our trainee progressing the way they need to be progressing? Summative, though, is more of a stretch for me. IDD: It’s done at the end of an intervention to assess the immediate impact and answer whether or not the intervention closed the gap we were trying to close. I could say that the GME summative evaluation is looking at “the immediate impact” of our training program, but the GME summative evaluation is an evaluation of the learner, not the program and that’s where my tie-ins fall apart. TL;DR (too long; didn’t read): What might mean one thing in IDD, may mean something else in another industry. It’s good for me to be aware of this potential “double-meaning” in order to avoid confusion with my future clients.
Course: Performance System Technology. Spring 2020
Assignment: Create an infographic to teach the most important information about intervention evaluation—overview, planning, and implementing—and provide my rationale.
Response: Evaluation is the foundation of a successful Performance Improvement Intervention. The three main types (formative, summative, and confirmative) form one part of the support. Underneath that is Meta Evaluation
which supports the overall evaluation process by confirming the validity of the other evaluations, and thus, the value of the intervention itself.
I believe it would be valuable to someone on-the-job primarily because it gives a basic and concise explanation of each evaluation type, its purpose, when it’s typically done in the life cycle of an intervention, and what is involved in the implementation of each evaluation type. For a practitioner, this could provide enough information for them to decide the type of evaluation needed and provides sufficient information for them to dig deeper should they need or want to do so.
Course: Performance System Technology. Spring 2020
Assignment: The text for this course (Van Tiem, Moseley, & Dessinger, 2012) presented 8 techniques as it applies to successful intervention implementation and maintenance:
We were asked to compare and contrast them and then determine which we felt is the most valuable tool to have in our tool-belt as an instructional designer and explain why.
After reading over the 8 techniques for successful intervention implementation and management, what struck me is that they are all interconnected. An organization identifies a problem and partners with a performance practitioner who begins with process consulting, then is part of the Project Management team. The project management team looks at the feasibility of a project, communicates with employees and other stakeholders in order to develop support (which will aid sustainability), and encourages employee development to ensure a smooth transition (change management).
The primary difference among these eight concepts is how individuals within an organization are involved. Feasibility studies, sustainability, project management, change management, and process consulting primarily involve the performance practitioner and management or a small group of individuals who would represent the organization as a whole. The remainder (partnering, networking, and alliance building; employee development; and communication) can be the actions of an organization or an individual (large-scale to small scale).
Examples of partnering, networking, and alliance building from large-scale to smaller-scale include the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine which represents U.S. Internal Medicine physicians and works to improve medical education and health care in general; slightly smaller, but still large would include subspecialties within internal and family medicine. Going smaller, within Birmingham there are partnerships with COA, UAB, and the VA which ensure a broader experience for medical students and residents. On an even smaller scale, within UAB, I’m part of a group of program coordinators in Graduate Medical Education. Widen that scale back out just a touch and, through a private facebook group, I network with other coordinators across the country and from different specialties.
Employee development can be an endeavor that the individual employee takes on or something required by the organization due to a change. UAB encourages employee development, but not everyone takes advantage of it and, sadly, I suspect many don’t realize just how much is out there! Likewise, when the Department of Medicine switched to a new Resident Management System, we all had to take part in training (development) in order to learn the new system.
Last but not least, communication happens everyday between individuals, between the C-suite and employees, Deans and students, between departments, and across campus.
Of course, the common thread is people. Considering the name of this class, this isn’t a surprise. But as a performance practitioner, I feel that project management would be the most important one to have in my tool belt.
Alvarenga et al (2019) completed a literature review and identified 28 traditional competencies. They then asked project managers to rate these competencies “on a 5-point Likert scale from scarcely important to extremely important to project success” (281). Two hundred fifty-seven project managers responded and identified communication, commitment and leadership as being the most important to project success (283). The authors also examined these “traditional . . . competencies according to project managers and the underlying groups of competencies” (281) and “identified seven groups of competencies: self-management, interpersonal, communication, technical, productivity, managerial and leadership” (287).
My takeaway from this article and chapter is that a successful Project Manager has a network of other performance practitioners and partners with organizations to identify problems, plan solutions (process consulting, feasibility), and plan implementation (communication, employee development, change management, sustainability).
Resources:
Alvarenga, J., Branco, R., Guedes, A., Soares, C. and Silva, W. (2019), “The project manager core competencies to project success”, International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, Vol. 13 No. 2, pp. 277-292. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJMPB-12-2018-0274
Van Tiem, D.M., Moseley, J.L., & Dessinger, J.C. (2012). Fundamentals of performance improvement: Optimizing results through people, process, and organizations (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons.
March 2020: Partnered project to create a website to teach classmates about Organizational Communication Interventions (Chapter 15 of our textbook) using Google Sites. Video was made using Adobe Spark. All graphics came from Pixabay (royalty-free/creative commons licensed images). Created chalkboard and caution signs using Photoshop. In order to embed video, I had to create a YouTube channel and upload from there. Rotating “take-aways” at the bottom of the site were done in Google Slides by my project partner, Andrew Sparks. We worked together to tweak the timing and autoplay. Layout was his idea and we worked together to make the sections cohesive and informative.
Source: Van Tiem, D.M., Moseley, J.L., & Dessinger, J.C. (2012). Fundamentals of performance improvement: Optimizing results through people, process, and organizations (3rd ed.). San Francisco, CA: John Wiley & Sons.
Course: Performance System Technology. Spring 2020
Assignment: Design a graphic organizer to compare and contrast and share what you have learned in your reading regarding the following: performance analysis, organizational analysis, environmental analysis, gap analysis, cause analysis.
Response: From the readings, I got the impression that the organizational, environmental, gap, and cause analyses were all part of the Performance Analysis. In analyzing performance, you look at the organization (its vision, mission, etc.) and the environment (influences from society, culture, skill level, etc.) to determine the desired and actual performances. From there, the gap analysis is done in order to identify the difference between the desired and actual performances, and lastly, a cause analysis to determine why that gap exists. I’m honestly not sure how to “compare and contrast” – They’re alike in that they are all analyzing aspects of performance process, but each analyzes a different aspect and they join together as the overall performance analysis.
March 2, 2020: This was a group project in which we worked with a client, Dr. Danielle Monteil, a geneticist at the US Naval Medical Center in Portsmouth, Virginia, to create a booklet to help her guide her patients through the process of deciding whether or not to have genetic testing done for hereditary cancer. After seeing how the color version printed out in grayscale, we opted to create a pure black and white copy and deliver both to our client for her to decide which she’d prefer to use.
My partners for this project were Victoria Dawkins and Melissa Simpson.
Goal Statement: Using the provided patient resource the patient will be able to explain the basic concepts associated with using genetic testing to predict hereditary cancer.
The following documents include the full design and analysis report, the final product (color and black & white), and the final report which was a reflection on the project.
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Course: Instructional Design (specifically, the Dick & Carey approach)
Assignment: Provide a sample instructional goal for each of the 4 learning domains (psychomotor skills, intellectual skills, verbal information, and attitude) discussed in our text book. Also provide a rational and real world examples or experience for each.
I went back to my music roots for this one.
Psychomotor skills:
Verbal information:
Intellectual skills:
Attitude:
Fall 2019: This was a group project for a course on Universal Design for Learning. In this assignment, Honest Ally Food International put out a Request for Proposal for a program to promote strategies aimed at addressing food insecurity.
Previous group projects were done via email or in-person. For this one, we utilized our group discussion area in Canvas (separate area from the class group discussion) and used Canvas’s Collaboration function to work on the project in Word Online.
My partners for this project were Christina Warren and Debbie Graves.
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