Situations that prompt teachers in problem-based curricula to reflect on their beliefs, identity and mission.

Teachers have different perceptions of how to enhance student learning. Whereas some take a teacher-centred perspective, others lean more towards a student-centred approach. Many studies in higher education have invoked Korthagen's onion model (2014) to explain how teachers' perspectives can impact their teaching practices. Spanning six interrelated layers, this model contains both outer (environment, behaviour, competencies) and inner (beliefs, identity, and mission) aspects. Focusing essentially on teachers' outer aspects, previous studies have paid scant attention to how particular situations affect teachers' inner aspects and, consequently, how teachers perceive student-centred learning. In this descriptive qualitative study, we explored situations that encouraged or discouraged teachers to embrace student-centred beliefs, identities and missions. We held three focus-group discussions with 18 teachers from two Indonesian medical schools, performing a thematic analysis of the data thus obtained. We found that certain situations made teachers reflect on their inner aspects, which either favourably or adversely affected their acceptance of a student-centred learning approach. Teachers' outer aspects (i.e. their prior problem-based teaching and learning experiences, learning situations from their own training as well as clinical duties) strongly interacted with their inner aspects, thereby shaping their teaching perspectives. Understanding how specific situations can influence teachers' inner aspects might help institutions to design faculty development programmes that address teachers' specific educational needs.

From individual to interprofessional: characteristics of assessment tasks to assess interprofessional collaboration in healthcare education.

To develop independent healthcare professionals able to collaborate in interprofessional teams, health professions education aims to support students in transitioning from an individual perspective to interprofessional collaboration. The five elements that yield the conditions for effective interprofessional collaboration are: (1) positive interdependence, (2) individual accountability, (3) promotive interaction, (4) interpersonal skills, and (5) reflection on team processes. The aim of the current study is to gain insights into how to design tasks to assess a student team as a whole on their interprofessional collaboration. This was a pilot study using a qualitative design to evaluate an interprofessional assessment task. Four interprofessional student teams, comprising physiotherapy, occupational therapy, arts therapy and nursing students (N = 13), completed this task and five assessors used a rubric to assess video recordings of the teams' task completion, and then participated in a group interview. The completed rubrics and the interview transcript were analyzed using content analysis. Findings showed that the combination of individual preparation, an interprofessional team meeting resulting in care agreements and team reflection was a strength of the assessment task, enabling the task to elicit sufficient promotive interaction between students. Areas for improvement of the assessment task were however, due to a lack of interdependence, the care agreements which now proved to be the sum of students' intraprofessional ideas rather than an interprofessional integration of agreements. Additionally, assessors suggested that a series of varying assessment tasks is required to draw conclusions about students' interprofessional competence.

From obese to lean curriculum: exploring students' experiences about developing competencies in medical education.

Introduction: Since the beginning of the 21st century, competency-based education has been proposed as an approach to education in many disciplines including the medical sciences and it has become a dominant approach in many countries. We aimed to explore the lived experiences of general medical students about developing competencies in the academic curriculum. Methods: We conducted a phenomenology method to study lived experiences of general medical students through selecting participants via a purposeful sampling strategy. Snowballing and maximum variation samplings were also applied to recruit additional participants. The study was conducted at a Medical School in Iran. Three successive phases of qualitative data analysis, namely, data reduction by coding, data structuring by categorization, and data interpretation by discussion were applied to analyze the interviews. Results: The results of the research showed that students' lived experiences fall under 4 main themes with 9 subthemes. The main themes show that (1) the compartmentalized curriculum in basic courses is experienced as the missing parts in a puzzle, (2) the physiopathology curriculum is experienced as swimming on land, (3) the externship is experienced as touring a mysterious land, (4) the internship is experienced as unleashed arrows. Discussion: Our findings reveal that despite the changes already made in the curriculum, its compartmentalization is still a main obstacle to achieving competency-based medical education. A strict requirement for leaving the discipline-based curriculum behind is to use an integrated approach, in which basic science courses are connected with clinical cases, and physiopathology courses are connected with externships and internships.