Postdoctoral Dental Education

Select a Module Module 01: Professional Life-Long Learning Plan Module 02: Community Asset Mapping Module 03: Multidisciplinary Team Care

Professional Life-Long Learning Plan

Step 1: Developing Learning Objectives

Developing Competency-Based Learning Objectives

If you are unsure about how to begin writing your learning plan, a good starting point are the program's competency statements. These statements can be found in your program website in the Program Information section of your portfolio. Competencies are general statements on dental techniques/skills, knowledge, and attitudes – this leaves a lot of flexibility for you to further refine these general statements to define your goals and how you like to learn. Let's look at this an example of a competency statement.

Competency: Critically assess published dental literature to acquire and organize information in an effective and systematic manner for assessing self-performance and knowledge, treatment therapies and outcomes, and scientific findings and technologies. Here are some learning objectives for this competency.

Objectives

• Explain the principles of Evidence Based Dentistry
• Use Pubmed to locate pertinent articles to address a clinical problem
• Evaluate scientific articles and evidence-based resources and apply them to a clinical case

Some competences are easier to work with if they are broken in smaller, more specific competency statements. Let's look at this example.

Competency: Demonstrate competency in managing oral-facial pain and anxiety in the conscious patient through the use of psychological interventions, behavior modification techniques, local anesthesia, and sedation techniques.

This statement covers a lot of topics. One way to divide this competency statement in sub-competencies to include in your learning plan might be:

Subcompetencies

• Demonstrate competency in applying behavioral modification techniques for children where sedation may not be the warranted.
• Demonstrate proficiency in the various local anesthesia techniques for pain control in mandibular arch. (In this example the word proficiency shows that you are already familiar with the various techniques, but you want to improve your clinical performance.)

Can you construct another sub-competency statement?

Developed by CCNMTL