Peer teaching AND ownership
This is perhaps one of the most important principles to be respected if we really want to change behaviour through our teaching. The psychologist mentioned in the previous paragraph, came teach us and a group of nurses the psychology of behaviour change. She was then teaching how to give interactive sessions but before she taught our nurses and ourselves, she asked us to teach the nurses how to search for and find evidence about the topic they are expected to teach.
And that was perhaps the crucial element of the whole intervention. Let the peers, the colleagues of the ones in the target group, gather knowledge and design their own teaching module. Once they have done so, even when they received the help from the established content experts, the peer teachers will consider it their own module and deliver it in a very different way than if they were given a module, designed by someone else. With the skills of retrieving evidence themselves and the help of established content experts, our nurses used their creativity to design interactive teaching modules. They received guidance on the interactive methodology from the psychologist and were also asked to incorporate important psychological elements of behaviour change.
And this worked! Not only could we see an increase in compliance to all infectious control practices but also could we notice a sharp increase in workplace happiness and job satisfaction among nurses. When before the intervention, nurses were requesting quite regularly to be transferred to other wards, after the intervention, rarely such requests came and if for some reason the hospital nursing admin decided to transfer nurses away from our ward, some were appealing the decisions.
Based on our sharp decrease in infection rates, an Australian team tried to formalize the interventions we applied and conducted a study including close to 15 hospitals in South East Asia. The main difference with our intervention was that the teaching modules were designed by Australian experts who insisted that the delivery of the modules followed an exact methodology as proposed by them. Even though some of the modules were still taught by nurses, this took away the part involving the creativity of the teachers. The nurses did not need to find the evidence themselves and go through the process of creating their modules. Ownership was not there. They were mainly the tools in the hand of Australian experts to deliver the messages from Australian experts. And that may have been a key factor why the formal large study showed generally a lack of efficacy, unlike the initial intervention in our hospital.
So, both the principles of peer teaching and ownership are key to successful behaviour modifying teaching.
In a completely different project, involving a school in a deprived area, we set out to deliver health education and motivation to secondary school students. The project began with a needs assessment in the school involved. From that assessment it became clear that also secondary school students do not appreciate to be told what to do by figures with authority. They indicated that they would more likely follow advice if it came from their friends, peers than if it came from teachers or other people with some authority, in this case us, doctors in the are of adolescent medicine and public health. We did adopt a peer teaching approach and the results of the program were exceeding our expectation is certain areas, at least.
I have created a few pages on interactive teaching with links below.
interactively teaching knowledge
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