They Don't Like It and They Don't Learn: Build Psychological Safety and Adult Learning Principles Into Your Academic Half Day

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, it has become more challenging for residents to develop close relationships within work and become a cohesive family. Some of these struggles include social distancing, personal or professional stressors, multiple workrooms, virtual education, and normalization of personal isolation. However, a sense of belonging, engagement, and collegiality within the workplace has been shown to promote wellness and reduce burnout.

What if your team could promote community among the residents while simultaneously applying adult learning theory in educational content? Our residency has been creating and innovating academic half-days for over 10 years. We have been able to build a curriculum repository of internal medicine topics that apply learning theories such as spacing, interleaving, and elaborative practice. These weekly educational conferences are conducted through small, consistent learning communities throughout the year to foster a sense of belonging and psychological safety. At this workshop, you will learn how to move academic half day away from passive lecture-based formats to interactive small group work rooted in evidence-based adult learning theory. We will review how to create active but psychologically safe longitudinal learning spaces and will show you how we build, assess, and refine our curriculum over a given year and across residency classes. We will also share the full curriculum. Our academic half day is an effective learning tool, and on many levels, the highest rated learning experience in our residency.