EACME Annual Conference 2024 – Presentation: Translating ethics into practice through competency-oriented teaching and learning: Experiences from the German KOMETH-Learn project
Presentation by Dr. Katja Kühlmeyer, Dr. Tobias Eichinger, Dr. Annett Wienmeister and Dr. Kathrin Knochel
Ethics teaching for health professions and disciplines should not only aim to impart knowledge, but above all to give students the opportunity to acquire competencies for their future professional activities. Ethical competencies consist of the abilities to align professional action with and reflect on professional ethical standards. Furthermore, they include the abilities to identify an ethical question or problem, to take different perspectives on issues, to make sound ethical judgments, and to realize an ethically justifiable action in practice. Such competencies are key for the implementation of a professional practice which is oriented towards ethical requirements.
Lecturers and teachers who are interested in competency-oriented teaching in the education and training of health professions need to be able to choose competence-based learning objectives, suitable didactic methods and tasks for assessing the skills level of students. Furthermore, they need to evaluate their learning arrangements with regard to their aims, which requires performance tests that assess underlying competencies. However, the required fundamental teaching skills neither have been described sufficiently in this field nor have they been taught in a structured manner, yet.
In the German-speaking countries, for example, very few articles or books are concerned with the didactics of competency-oriented ethics teaching in the health professions. At the same time, curricula for academic and professional education are currently being realigned, putting an emphasis on the acquisition of (ethical) competencies. Teaching will be more and more oriented towards verifiable competence-based learning objectives.
The working group „ethik learning“ of the Academy of Ethics in Medicine (AEM) is currently dedicated to competency-oriented ethics teaching and learning in the health professions. It aims to bring together teachers from scientific and clinical institutions in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. As part of the KOMETH-Learn project, the group aims at enabling and encouraging academic and professional teachers to develop competency-oriented teaching formats and to implement innovative didactic approaches. The goals will be achieved by developing and providing: a) a collection of competency-oriented teaching concepts and methods in the form of a digitally available „Ethics teaching toolbox“ including a repository of specific case vignettes, b) a text- and workbook for ethics teaching and c) a training concept (teach-the-teacher). Furthermore, the project will intensify the group“s national and international networking activities to allow for knowledge-transfer across different areas and disciplines.
In this presentation, we will present the work of the „ethik learning“ group. Furthermore, we will reflect on the potential as well as on challenges of competency-oriented ethics teaching in the health professions and disciplines at a conceptual, organizational and practical level as a way to translate ethics into practice.