Mahesh Thapa
Seattle Children's Hospital
Background: The implementation of a Flipped Classroom (FC) in a national conference workshop such as the Society for Pediatric Radiology (SPR) has not been evaluated qualitatively.
Objective: Qualitatively evaluate attitudes of attendees who participated in the Teaching Portfolio workshop held at the 2018 SPR 2018 annual meeting toward FC, maintaining an electronic teaching portfolio, writing a teaching philosophy, and quantifying teaching activities.
Materials and Methods: Of the 41 registered people (23 female and 18 male), 18 (9 female and 9 male) attended the workshop. All answered questions at the workshop and agreed to be interviewed over the phone at a later date. 10 (6 female and 4 male) were interviewed over the phone and the recordings transcribed (42 double spaced pages). Integrative qualitative method was used to code workshop questions and the in-depth interviews.
Results: Workshop questions revealed that most attended the workshop to gain knowledge of new online tools; create a teaching portfolio; and become a better educator. By the end of the workshop, attendees learned to navigate Google Sites™ to create a teaching portfolio; write a teaching philosophy; migrate teaching portfolio from analog to digital; and assign credit to teaching/scholarly activities. In depth analysis of the interviews revealed the attendees overwhelmingly believe learning about and implementing the FC method made them better educators. All also felt a great appreciation of FC as a form of active learning. Many believe the technique requires self-motivated learners and needs restructuring of already created lectures. All the attendees were able to create a teaching portfolio website by the end of the workshop and a few have started to add content. Besides the actual creation of the website, the largest barrier to maintaining the electronic portfolio was reported to be inadequate time to collect the data. A few have started writing a teaching philosophy; one has completed it. The most popular method of electronically keeping track of teaching activity is Google Calendars™.
