Developing Professional Learners
How Professionalism is Taught and Assessed in Dentistry
Professionalism entails the conduct, behavior, and attitude of someone within the workplace. In dentistry, professionalism is vital in developing trust in patients as they are expected to create a high reputation, work ethics, and excellence. Teaching professionalism helps in understanding the responsibilities of a well-nurtured professional. The teaching of professionalism helps instill and nurture learners on developing personal qualities, values, attitudes, and behaviors, which are essential in dentistry. Developing professionalism helps students understand and identify the concepts that lead to quality work and professional identity development. Professionalism can be taught in various ways, such as demonstrating good professional behaviors and attributes which help to work well with patients and tasks involved. Working with patients need proper care, compassion, empathy, appropriate communication.
Teaching professionalism can also be taught by instilling competence skills. Competence entails observing activities that develop the expertise of health professionals. The competencies are skill-based, measurable, and fine-grained (Forouzadeh, Kiani & Bazmi, 2018). Competencies help the learners be more proficient and quickly master the complex set of essential skills in the healthcare sector. Teaching professionalism can also be done by demonstrating entrustable professional activities by competent people to the learners. The activities create trust and competence in the learners, making them create fitness to practice. The demonstration of good professional behaviors helps the learners act ethically and develop competence, which makes them legally and safely allowed to health for practice.
Professionalism needs to be assessed to declare a health personnel fit for practice. Assessment for professionals can be done by checking on the academic outcomes, which entail having the formal assessment linked curriculum learning outcomes. The academic assessment involves a clear understanding of professional guidance, laws, or ethics required in the profession and communication skills (Armitage-Chan, 2016). Academic assessments are also conducted through checking on practical skills in various tests required in the healthcare sector.
Professionalism is also assessed by checking on professional fitness, which entails professional behavior such as university disciplinary matters such as theft and plagiarism, professional behavior that is accorded during practices such as lateness or attendance (Armitage-Chan, 2016). The portraying of either good or bad behavior can be used as an assessment tool for showing concerns to the people they are attending upon. The assessment is considered through compliance with the regulatory body’s health practices and standards, such as required safety measures.
Professional Development Activity
Mentoring is a program I have been involved in in my course as a learner. In school, I have been involved in the mentoring program as a mentee. Our mentors could offer career information, guidance, motivation, and moral support, which was important in exploring my career, setting goals, developing contacts, and identifying resources. Mentoring is important to students as it helps to acquire knowledge and skills from the mentors. Mentoring is typically a process where experienced individuals help other people develop accomplishing their goals by offering them skills and other learning activities. There are different forms of mentoring, which range from formal to informal. Formal mentoring involves helping other people with the previous mentioning of intentions to mentor. Informal mentoring is usually based on a relationship where a mentor will help the mentee without mentioning or without a prior plan (Cleary, Jackson, Sayers & Lopez, 2017). Mentoring at professional levels helps the mentees develop specific job skills or leadership capacities, which will help them gain experience in different contexts in their field of study.
For successful mentoring, the mentor and mentee need to develop various mentoring skills, including listening actively, building trust, determining goals and building capacity, encouraging, and inspiring. Listening actively helps build a positive and acceptable environment that permits open communication, and it is important to the mentee. This may involve the correct identification of body language used. Building trust is important in keeping the conversation and other communications. The mentees and mentor need to develop trust with the information from the other partner. The mentor needs to assist the mentees in developing their goals by providing them with information, skill, and knowledge (Ward, Hargrave, Brown, Halkett & Hogg, 2017). In this way, they are encouraging and inspiring to the mentees.
The Mentoring process entails the formation of a mentoring relationship between the mentor and mentee. The mentoring relationship moves in progressive developmental stages. The stages are important in eluding a strong relationship, which enhances success in the mentoring process. The first stage in mentoring is building a relationship that involves gaining trust in the relationship. This may include the discussion of expectations, interests, or the background of the concerned people. The stage is important in developing a regular communication schedule and the means of communication (Gasper, 2020). The second stage is exchanging information and setting goals. This unfolds the relationship between the mentor and mentee as they exchange more information and set the goals. In this stage, the mentee is expected to be more proactive and practice active listening with consistent encouragement from the mentor. The mentor also offers guidance to the mentee in making major decisions. By exchanging information and setting goals, the mentee opens up, and he or she can understand beyond day-to-day demands.
The third stage is working towards achieving the goals. This stage is characterized by a good conversation between the mentor and mentee, where they share various development activities and resources. This is the challenging stage faced with problems such as limited time and energy, building trust after a short period, and being sensitive to differences. The last stage is ending the formal mentoring relationship and planning for the future (Gasper, 2020). This stage is defined by the mentee defining the support he or she needs in the future. The stage reflects on the accomplishments, challenges, and progress towards the goals, the other form of support that the mentee may need in the future, discussing whether the relationship will continue informally and how you will implement that; and expressing thanks and best wishes. The mentoring program helped me after passing all the stages in establishing goals of learning as dentistry.
Learning points
Learning about professionalism and how it is included in contemporary medical and health professions’ curricula and an introduction to supporting peers and students in their professional development
Ways of teaching professionalism in the healthcare sector including demonstrating good professional behaviors and attribute and instilling competence skills
Ways of assessing professionalism in the healthcare sector, including checking on the academic outcomes and checking on professional fitness, which entails the professional’s behavior.
Professional development activities, such as mentoring, counseling, and supervision.
References
Cleary, M., Jackson, D., Sayers, J. M., & Lopez, V. (2017). Building Early Academic Career Capacity through Mentoring. Issues in Mental Health Nursing, 38(11), 971-973.
Gasper, M. (2020). Three Key Stages in Mentoring and Coaching. Mentoring and Coaching in Early Childhood Education, 180.
Ward, E. C., Hargrave, C., Brown, E., Halkett, G., & Hogg, P. (2017). Achieving Success in Clinically Based Research: The Importance of Mentoring. Journal of Medical Radiation Sciences, 64(4), 315-320.
Forouzadeh, M., Kiani, M., & Bazmi, S. (2018). Professionalism and its Role in the Formation of Medical Professional Identity. Medical Journal of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 32, 130.
Armitage-Chan, E. (2016). Assessing Professionalism: A Theoretical Framework for Defining Clinical Rotation Assessment Criteria. Journal of veterinary medical education, 43(4), 364-371.