This session is designed to deliver "transformative learning", which is defined as learning centered on strengthening leadership attributes to generate enlightened change within health professionals. Much of public health practice is driven through competency-based skills. Public health practitioners are challenged to apply often numerous and complex competencies to even more complex decision making and problem solving. This session will explore how our approach to public health education and training prepares students for the complexities of real-world decision making and is appropriate for anyone teaching in a dynamic and interactive setting. Based on our experience with a case-based and competency-based education model that integrates large group (classroom) and small group (learning team) approaches, we will demonstrate the effectiveness and flexibility of our program through an interactive demonstration. We will discuss the synthesis of public health curriculum by focusing on practice and experience based learning through an application of case-based pedagogy derived from a Canadian context. This workshop will also compare, contrast, appraise and propose new types of educational offerings for their relevance and ability to meet current and future public health challenges.
Delegates will be better equipped to both use and understand competency-based approaches to problem-solving. Delegates will also learn about the evidence behind learning and working in teams, and be able to apply this to their daily work. By experiencing the case-method in action, delegates will learn to identify and comprehend ambiguous problems, become more comfortable dealing with uncertainty, enhance written and verbal communication skills, rapidly react to a changing environment and build on leadership and team collaboration skills. We will also have case books for our delegates to take with them, to use in their own practice. Case learning can be an excellent format for brown bag/seminar series on the job and can act as a continuing education for public health staff.
We will also spend time discussing our current evaluation project and use this workshop as an opportunity to engage interested educators in a discussion around how best to evaluate this type of learning.
Some of the critical scholarship questions we are beginning to explore are:
- What are the appropriate teaching skills for case method learning?
- What effective facilitation skills are required?
- What are the ideal methods of student and program evaluation of this format?
