Friday Night Fights: Addressing Clinical Team Dynamics and Teaching Collaboration Skills in an Age of Polarization

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Session Type: Concurrent Sessions

Session Capacity: N/A

Location: N/A

Room: Plaza A

Floor: Lobby Level

Clinicians have long taught collaboration and teamwork, implicitly if not explicitly. But the urgent need to work together to face our many challenges has put a premium on successful pedagogy related to this under-valued skill, and we aim in this concurrent session to call out this pedagogy specifically, providing concrete takeaways for session participants that will help them improve their practice. The situations are familiar to all of us: the student team that can’t seem to get along; the student who won’t let their partner do any work or get a word in edgewise; the teammate who doesn’t pull their weight; the group that fails to communicate with their supervisor, or each other. Team dynamics are often a challenge in clinics because the stakes (real clients) are high and students often have minimal or nonexistent experience working in teams in a professional setting. From the division of labor, to client communication, to case coordination, to internal and external communication, there are a variety of inflection points at which poor collaboration skills can undermine the team’s goals for the case or project. We will draw on the existing literature on this topic, our varied experiences, and current conversations within the clinical community about how to foster exceptional collaboration at the outset, and how to make “teaching moments” out of the inevitable conflicts that will arise each semester.