Teaching Professionalism: Using Role-Play Simulations to Generate Professionalism Learning Outcomes.

For a constructively aligned curriculum in veterinary professionalism, there is a need for well-designed higher order learning outcomes to support students' professional identity formation. A lack of uniformly accepted definitions of veterinary professionalism necessitates the defining and refining of current concepts of professionalism to inform teaching and assessment. A potential method for achieving such learning outcomes is to generate these from simulated professionalism teaching scenarios. A workshop was designed in which veterinary educators used role play to resolve a professional dilemma. Following discussion of the appropriate management approach, participants were asked to reflect on the learning outcomes that were required to resolve the scenario and that students would achieve by going through the same classroom-based process. Workshop participants identified several professionalism learning outcomes that are not currently defined in the literature: realizing that there is not a single correct answer to a professional dilemma, making a decision despite this uncertainty, communicating differences of opinion, and understanding the effect of differences in professional identity. Although the process described runs counter to traditional curricular design, it may offer a valuable contribution to the discourse surrounding professionalism learning outcomes. Furthermore, it has generated higher level learning outcomes than have been obtained through other methods.