5

Building Facilitating Structures for Informal Faculty Development (Step 4)

HIGHLIGHTS

• Some of the most profound insights can come from incidental and informal learning. (Sherman)
• Faculty should strive to create “learnable moments” when they are open to and aware of the potential for learning. (Sherman)

BUILDING FACILITATING STRUCTURES FOR INFORMAL (AND INCIDENTAL) FACULTY DEVELOPMENT

Lawrence Sherman, Meducate Global, LLC, and Association for Medical Education in Europe

“Informal and incidental learning does not mean unimportant learning,” said Lawrence Sherman, principal of Meducate Global, LLC, and international development expert at the Association for Medical Education in Europe (AMEE). Learning can happen in any time or place, including a casual conversation, watching a movie, or reading a comic strip. Sherman said that while his presentation was focused specifically on faculty development, informal learning is a lifelong process for all people. For example, he said, finding and cultivating a prospective faculty member (i.e., pre-faculty development) could happen informally and incidentally, through a chance meeting or a casual conversation. While informal faculty development is the fourth step in the framework, he said that it is applicable to all of the other steps as well.

Sherman offered definitions for both informal and incidental learning, which are sometimes used interchangeably but are quite different. Informal learning, he said, is learning that happens outside a formal environment (e.g., classroom) but where there is still an expectation of learning. For example, informal learning could happen while reading articles, watching a webinar, listening to mentors, or talking with colleagues. Incidental learning, on the other hand, is learning that happens “when you don’t expect it.” These experiences can happen while watching television, talking with a passenger on a plane, looking at social media, or interacting with people outside one’s own profession. For example, Sherman said, he has learned lessons from conversations with people ranging from oil executives to pilots about how to be a better teacher. He also noted that “there were no greater lessons learned about presenting to a challenging audience or a group of learners” than being a stand-up comic at 2:00 a.m. in a comedy club in New York—these lessons are engrained in him.

At the 2019 workshop Strengthening the Connection Between Health Professions Education and Practice, four broad themes were identified: technology, incentives and support, interprofessional continuing education, and communication. In all of these areas, said Sherman, one can see the value of informal and incidental education. He noted that informal education does not necessarily require financial resources, but it requires investing time in building a system that supports faculty in connecting with one another and allows for opportunities for informal learning. Sherman said there have been many times in his career when he learned lessons from a “conversation with somebody in the hallway,” or talking to someone in a different profession who had a different perspective on practice or education. We encourage faculty to create “teachable moments” for students, he said, but faculty also need to strive to find “learnable moments” for themselves. Sherman asked participants in a poll whether informal and incidental learning are important to faculty development. Some participants chose “Yes, of course!” while others chose “Yes, but it only happens when it happens.”

Is it possible, asked Sherman, to be intentionally incidental and informal? In the context of learning, a learner can be guided, with the objectives controlled by the teacher, or a learner can be the discoverer and in control of the learning objectives (see Figure 5-1). The beauty of informal and incidental learning, said Sherman, is that it is unstructured, unplanned, unexpected, and the learner identifies their own opportunities for new skills and knowledge. However, it is possible to be intentional in encouraging faculty to discover things on their own. Intentionally encouraging and supporting informal learning can help identify, support, and retain faculty, he said. For example, faculty can be encouraged to intentionally identify skills or knowledge that they need, and to find “learnable moments” to develop these.

Workshop participants offered ideas in the chat box about how informal and incidental learning could be supported and facilitated (see Box 5-1). Chappell noted that recognizing and reflecting on incidental learning is a skill, and wondered if this skill could be strengthened in faculty. Poll-Hunter said that for informal and incidental learning to be effective, faculty “need to be comfortable with being uncomfortable and being inconvenienced.” Kylie Dotson-Blake concurred and added that successful education requires seeing learners as people “who bring their whole selves, their full complexities of context and intersections of identity and experiences into the learning community.” Participants mentioned faculty book clubs, the use of “near-peer” mentors for guidance and training, brown bag lunches, volunteering, and community engagement. Artino brought up “water cooler learning,” and Sherman noted that this type of informal learning could

even take place virtually, with a weekly informal video chat between colleagues. Poll-Hunter mentioned that the chat box itself was an example of an environment for informal learning.

To close, Sherman showed participants a framework for informal and incidental learning that was developed by Marsick and Watkins and later modified by Cseh et al. (1998) (see Figure 5-2). The model describes the process of workplace learning based on a trigger occurring in a specific context, followed by problem solving and ongoing reflection (Marsick et al.,

2006). Sherman encouraged workshop participants to consider how they might incorporate such a framework into their own faculty development efforts before handing the microphone over to Poll-Hunter.

Poll-Hunter thanked Sherman for calling attention to those learnable moments in everyday life to maximize our own informal education. With that, Poll-Hunter moved to the final session.

REFERENCES

This page intentionally left blank.