Facilitator Guide
- Introduce yourself, your background/interests, and why you wanted to be a facilitator.
- Have the students introduce themselves to you.
- Ask about their interests, hobbies, and career ideas—jot down their names and interests.
- If you’ve already been with this group, take time to refamiliarize yourself with them.
- Explain that this session is an example of case-based learning and explain what that means.
- An active, collaborative, small-group learning style that uses a clinical case to explore different scientific concepts.
- It is meant to be interactive with a lot of communication between students.
- It presents the many different roles on a healthcare team, and students are encouraged to view themselves in these roles.
- Establish ground rules for the group.
- Students should be active participants in the discussion, ask questions, and answer each other’s questions.
- Students should respect each other’s opinions, backgrounds, experiences, and responses.
- Students should not interrupt classmates when they are speaking.
- Add your own guidelines, or add guidelines that the students may have for themselves.
- Let students know it is okay if they do not know the answer, but rather than staying silent, you would like them to at least try, or provide their thoughts or reasoning.
- Be clear about your role.
- A guide for students as they explore different aspects of the case.
- Not there to lecture them or be the content expert.
- Help students select their role
- Scribe—Records important information, questions, and theories on patient diagnosis.
- Primary Case Reader—Reads information provided about the case.
- Secondary Case Reader—Clicks on and reads the interactive pop-ups and reads the “Student Notes” sections.
- Ask questions to encourage student interaction.
- The facilitator questions in the eBook provides answers and additional questions to ask students.
- Feel free to ask your own relevant questions about the case.
- If no one responds at first, rephrase the question rather than giving the answer.
- Provide stories or clinical context, but don’t be the center of attention for too long.
- If a student asks you a question:
- Give the question to the group: “What does the group think about this?”
- Help the students get to the answer themselves.
- Rephrase the question so students can approach it differently.
- Break down a question into smaller concepts.
- Explain or expand on information without lecturing.
- If you don’t know the answer, tell them that you don’t know and offer to find the information.
- This lets them know that it’s okay not to know the answer.
- Encourage group interaction.
- Ask each member of the group to provide a response.
- This encourages quiet students to participate and takes the spotlight off dominant students.
- Ask each member of the group to provide a response.
- Ask individual students to respond.
- Use eye contact, positive body language, and address each student by their name
- Maintain a positive environment and positive group dynamics.
- Check in with students—ask if they have any final questions.
- Point out the positive things you noted during that session.