Interprofessional teaching opportunities available

Tyler Reimschisel, associate vice provost for interprofessional education and research, and the Office of Interprofessional and Interdisciplinary Education and Research invite faculty, staff and advance graduate-level students to explore interprofessional teaching opportunities. Get credit for teaching while meeting others on campus, learning interprofessional teamwork skills and spending time team-teaching topics of interest. Interprofessional teaching opportunities can be tailored to participants’ level of interest and availability. No prior interprofessional teaching experience is required or expected. 

Opportunities include:

  • Student team coaching,
  • Interprofessional team teaching,
  • Designing clinically based interprofessional experiences and
  • Creating innovative interprofessional experiences.

Student Team Coaching

In Collaborative Practice I (CPI), a required interprofessional service learning experience for all entry-level health professions and social work students, teams of students learn teamwork skills while working on an authentic, community-based project focused on health and well-being. Each student team receives team coaching one Wednesday afternoon in January or early February, from 3 to 5 p.m. Prior to the sessions, coaches receive eight hours of training and individuals become certified team coaches once they complete the student team coaching sessions. All costs related to certification will be paid by the Office of Interprofessional and Interdisciplinary Education and Research.

Classroom Instructors

There are also opportunities to teach in the CPI team-based learning (TBL) classroom sessions. Each class is held on Wednesdays from 3 to 5 p.m. in the Samson Pavilion on the Health Education Campus. Each TBL session is team taught with faculty, students and community agency staff from different professions. The time commitment for this role includes meeting with team members a few times before the sessions to make iterative improvements in the content. Instructors then teach in all four sessions (one session per Wednesday afternoon for four consecutive weeks). 

Topics for the TBL sessions include: 

  • Team charter for interprofessional service learning,
  • Team communication skills and project management,
  • Fostering psychological safety and mitigating implicit bias through inclusion,
  • Roles and responsibilities in an interprofessional clinical setting,
  • Deconstructive feedback and structural competency,
  • History of Cleveland and collaborative problem-solving with curiosity,
  • Conflict management through deconstructive feedback,
  • Values and ethics in an interprofessional team (Parts I and II),
  • Applying systems thinking to team projects, and
  • Leading change as a team within a system.

Designing Clinically Based Interprofessional Experiences

Collaborative Practice II is an interprofessional experience in which advanced health professions and social work students will work as a team on an authentic, clinically oriented project while completing a clinical elective, rotation, practicum or other experience. 

This interprofessional experience is being designed before it is implemented during the 2022-23 academic year. Involvement in this interprofessional project includes attending planning meetings a few times each month, identifying inpatient or outpatient clinical sites, providing interprofessional faculty development to the personnel at the clinical sites, designing the curriculum that will be taught to the student teams, creating the assessment and evaluation system, and implementing the experience next year. 

Creating Innovative Interprofessional Experiences

In the next few weeks, the Office of Interprofessional and Interdisciplinary Education and Research will share a call for proposals for faculty, students and staff to design and implement innovative interprofessional and interdisciplinary short courses, workshops and other educational opportunities that will appeal to individuals across various professions and disciplines. Administrative support and limited funding will be available to interprofessional teams that create and implement these experiences. Watch The Huddle for an announcement about this call for proposals!

The Office of Interprofessional and Interdisciplinary Education and Research will work with participants on getting credit for teaching and determining the level of involvement that works best for individuals. Please contact Tyler Reimschisel to learn more about these opportunities.