Chatting with Louise Allen on continuous professional development, qualitative research and the need for mentorship and guided self-reflection

Louise Allen, a dietician by background and currently a post-doctoral researcher in Medical Education, shares her personal experiences and research on social learning journeys and effective CPD. In episode ten we chat with Dr Louise Allen, a post-doctoral researcher in Medical Education at the University of Melbourne in Australia, and a consultant for continuous professional development (CPD). Louise shares her journey from practitioner to PhD at Monash University in CPD and its impacts – recommending finding a research project you are interested in and making sure you find the right supervisor. She mentions needing to get to grips with educational theory and its language. Louise was drawn to CPD based on her own experiences formal (and informal, apprenticeship and self-regulated style) learning during her doctoral and of the (often) ineffectiveness of CPD offerings required of health professionals – wondering why that might be and how it can be improved. This includes critiquing current evaluation models, such as recognising the limitations current approaches (like Kirkpatrick’s model) that do not explain the ‘how’ and ‘why’ certain interventions actually work! In terms of understanding the ‘whole story’ Louise also shared her Fulbright research, a narrative study on physicians’ CPD learning journeys, and the many challenges of CPD, the importance of informal learning opportunities (and how they should count towards CPD), and social learning (especially in a world of online education). She ends by encouraging learners to not be put off by new language of educational research, developing research projects that actually interest others and have real world impact, putting the ‘quality’ (rigour) back in qualitative research and being paradigmatically coherent, and, lastly, finding a good mentor. You can read Louise’s publications here (https://findanexpert.unimelb.edu.au/profile/1039018-louise-allen). The other papers she recommended are “How to discuss transferability of qualitative research in health professions education” by Stalmeijer et al. (2024) in The Clinical Teacher and “Shedding the cobra effect: problematising thematic emergence, triangulation, saturation and member checking” by Varpio et al. (2017) in Medical Education.

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