This focus session is intended for any faculty member who has painstakingly planned and implemented an education intervention and then watched as it failed to achieve desired outcomes. For those who innovate, failure of education interventions is a reality, and we can learn from both what went wrong and what happened next. Yet many of these stories are untold in our traditional forms of dissemination. This focus session provides a space for us to share these challenges and learn from the ways our institutions adapted.

At KU School of Medicine, we knew from student and faculty feedback that our student teams were not fully achieving a desired learning outcome – engaging group feedback to improve team performance in small group learning. The course director collaborated with the educational team to develop a carefully planned, theory-based intervention to address the problem. The intervention, however, ultimately failed because multiple faculty members would not implement the change.

In this session, we will share our experience as a case of a failed intervention. Participants will identify and share practical implementation challenges that cause education interventions to fail, and how they’ve responded when interventions produce unremarkable results. Knowing the roadblocks others have faced could help education researchers more successfully plan future interventions.  

Learning Outcomes

• Paraphrase education innovation challenges reported in health professions literature
• Discuss implementation strategies drawn from implementation research literature
• Recall stories of implementation challenges shared by participants
• Identify options for next steps when education innovations fail or produce unremarkable results
• List strategies for self-care and mindset management when experiencing disappointment or embarrassment related to failure
• Predict potential points of failure for future education interventions