Teaching and Assessing Professionalism: Moving from a Deficit Framework to a Growth Mindset

This workshop describes a novel approach to the assessment of learner professionalism, a core competency essential to the practice of medicine. Professionalism and professional behaviors are not inherent traits. Rather, learners acquire and practice professional attitudes and behaviors developmentally and in parallel to their growing knowledge and skills. Despite these parallel developmental trajectories, educators across the UME-GME continuum lack similar standardized assessment metrics or learner support guidelines for the professionalism competency. Instead, educators rely on a traditional deficit model focused primarily on assessment through the identification of lapses. This "dichotomous characterization" of learner behaviors as either unprofessional or professional can leave learners feeling ashamed or uncertain, increase the risk of bias in faculty evaluations, and magnify faculty fears of the repercussions of labeling learners as "unprofessional." The goal of this workshop is to offer a new growth-oriented framework for professionalism assessment for learners across the continuum. After introductions to key concepts and discussion of the challenges of professionalism assessment for learners, faculty, and program leadership, presenters will facilitate a case-centered discussion regarding their experiences of professionalism assessment and offer a new growth model that frames professionalism as a practice, with attitudes, behaviors, and skills that develop over time as well as missteps that are expected as a normal element of learning and growth. Presenters will also distribute resources to train faculty and UME/GME program leadership on how to incorporate, assess, and support professionalism growth across the learning environment using this new growth mindset model.