Health Professions Faculty Development Initiative
The Health Professions Faculty Development Initiative (HPFDI) is a faculty development program designed to enhance teaching for clinicians and health professional faculty across the VCU Health Sciences campus. The program was developed at VCU in 2019 to support faculty development in teaching behaviors and to develop a model for effective teaching in an interprofessional setting.
HPFDI currently offers the following services:
- Enhance Your Teaching workshops and conferences - in person or virtual
- Consultative services for schools, departments, programs
- Individual faculty coaching and teaching observation
Enhance Your Teaching Workshops
The Enhance Your Teaching workshops are based on the Stanford Faculty Development Center framework; an evidence-based, non-prescriptive behavioral approach to teaching and learning with a rich 40-year history of documented success. The model is applicable to all health professions and to those teaching in the classroom, small group settings, distance learning, or the clinical setting.
Questions? Send a message to hpfdi@vcu.edu.
Each of the seven individual sessions incorporates a multimedia approach, including mini-lectures, video observations, application worksheets, and goal setting pocket cards. HPFDI offers all seven workshops in a cohort format throughout the year. The following workshops will provide participants with:
- Learning Climate: evidence for teaching behaviors that can be used to create a stimulating, engaging, and respectful learning environment.
- Control of Session (Leading in Your Teaching): strategies to focus and pace a teaching interaction, as influenced by the teacher’s leadership style.
- Communication of Goals: communicate and establish expectations for learners at each teaching interaction.
- Promotion of Understanding and Retention: strategies for “packaging content” and for fostering meaningful interactions with the content, to support understanding and retention.
- Evaluation: strategies to assess learners’ knowledge, skills, and attitudes as related to their educational goals.
- Feedback: information about their performance in order to assist the learner in improving their performance.
- Promotion of Self-Directed Learning: foster internal motivation for learning, thus encouraging learners to become an active participant in their own education.
Please print or have these documents available for each respective session. All documents are PDF.
The Spring 2024 cohort will meet weekly on the following Fridays from 12:00pm-1:30pm via Zoom:
- February 9: Learning Climate
- February 16: Control of Session
- February 23: Communication of Goals
- March 1: Promotion of Understanding and Retention
- March 15: Evaluation
- March 22: Feedback
- March 29: Promotion of Self-Directed Learning
Registration for the Spring 2024 cohort-style once weekly 90-minute interactive Zoom sessions is now closed.
Workshops are free and available to VCU Health Sciences faculty, graduate learners, and VCU Health clinicians and trainees.
To extract the most from this series, please attend all seven sessions. We strongly encourage you to add all session dates to your calendar upon registration.
We will share additional information, including links to the Zoom meeting and workshop materials the week of the first session. Feel free to reach out with any questions to hpfdi@vcu.edu
Consultative Services
The HPFDI team is enthusiastic about meeting the needs of programs, departments and schools on the VCU Health Campus and is able to provide the following consultative services:
- Grand Rounds and other single lectures
- Faculty development retreats
- Full seminar series on faculty development in teaching skills
- Consultation in faculty development program development
Initial consultation regarding needs assessment, content, structure, format should be done at least 90 days before any planned events. Final Dates/Times must be completed prior to the one month date/time deadline. HPFDI requires a 10 person minimum for programming.
Requestor responsibilities:
- Communication:
- Advertising to potential participants
- Setting up calendar invites and reminders to participants
- Tracking attendance and providing HPFDI with attendance records
- Logistics:
- Routing materials to participants as supplied by HPFDI to participants
- Securing space for in-person sessions; creating and hosting Zoom meetings for virtual sessions
- Support AV needs, as communicated by HPFDI
HPFDI responsibilities:
- Content:
- Provide materials, including workshop expectations, for requestor to route to participants
- Provide certificates of completion for those who complete the criteria
- Staffing:
- Assign facilitator(s) to workshop(s)
- Evaluation:
- Provide post-session evaluation surveys and follow-up, as requested
Interested in an HPFDI consult? Send a message to ipecenter@vcu.edu with:
Requestor Name
Requestor Department
Requestor Email
Nature of request, include as many details currently known.
HPFDI Facilitators
Dr. Burns is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Family and Community Health Nursing, and the Director of Practice-Based Interprofessional Education with the VCU Center for Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Care. Dana received her Masters Science of Nursing from Columbia University, followed by obtaining her Post Master and Doctorate in Nursing Practice degrees from Florida Atlantic University. Dr. Burns maintains a clinical practice with The Center for Healthy Hearts, a faculty led/student driven interprofessional teaching clinic for the underserved, vulnerable populations of Richmond. She enjoys teaching several classes in the FNP program and across various VCU Health programs. Her areas of research interest are in resilience and mindfulness in the clinical and academic environments. She has been awarded the Excellence Interprofessionalism Award for her contribution to interprofessional education and collaborative practice.
Dr. Lauretta (Laurie) Cathers serves as director of the Ph.D. in Health Related Sciences program and the Bachelor of Science in Health Services Program for the College of Health Professions. In this capacity, she works in collaboration with the nine departments of the school to provide interdisciplinary health science education. She has been at Virginia Commonwealth University for 20 years and has focused mostly on community based research in HIV and Addiction. She received her PhD in Health Related Sciences, concentration in Rehabilitation Counseling Leadership from VCU in 2013. She engages in a variety of research, teaching and service projects. In addition to being program director, she teaches in both the PhD and BSHS programs, the School of Dentistry behavioral science curriculum (a collaborative project between the Department of Rehabilitation Counseling and the School of Dentistry) and guest lectures across departments on topics such as patient communication, addiction and qualitative research methods. Dr. Cathers’ current research includes such topics as: addiction and end of life care, and social gaming and gambling among college students. Her research methodology experience ranges from randomized clinical trials to qualitative inquiry. For the past several years, she has served as a VCU Humphrey Fellows advisor. Dr. Cathers resides in Richmond, Virginia with her husband, Kevin, and two dogs.
Dr. Chopski is an associate professor in the Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Hospital Medicine. He received his medical degree from the West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine and completed Internal Medicine residency at VT-Carilion in his hometown of Roanoke, Virginia. He completed the Teaching in Medical Education Certificate for advanced faculty development. He joined the Internal Medicine faculty in 2014 and is active in inpatient education, particularly in resident procedure training. He worked on multiple quality improvement projects and currently serves as medical director for the hospitalist-led inpatient units.
Dr. Chopski is experienced in interprofessional education through the Introduction to Quality and Patient Safety (IPEC 502) course with nursing, pharmacy and medical students. He also has a passion for wilderness medicine and teaches courses to a variety of medical professionals including students, paramedics, APPs and physicians at the regional and national level.
Dr. Laura Morgan Frankart is Director of Education and Assessment and an Professor for the VCU School of Pharmacy.
Dr. Frankart received her Pharm.D. from UNC-Chapel Hill and her Residency was completed at University of Texas Health Science Center At San Antonio. After coming to VCU she earned her M.Ed. In Adult Learning. Her professional and scholarly interests include the areas of Pain Management and Educational research.
Dr. Lanning completed her Doctor of Dental Surgery degree from State University of New York at Buffalo, and certificate in Periodontology from VCU. Dr. Lanning is Professor and Chair, Department of Periodontics, VCU’s School of Dentistry and Core Faculty with the Center for Interprofessional Education and Collaborative Care. She is a board certified periodontist of the American Academy of Periodontology. She is a published author of peer-reviewed journals focusing on higher and health science education. Dr. Lanning has presented at a number of annual conferences including the American Academy of Periodontology, American Dental Education Association, and All Together Better Health.