Celebration of Education Scholarship
Celebration of Education Scholarship, Nov 22-23, 2021
Productive Failure - Lessons for Lifelong Learning
We are delighted that our new Chair, Dr. Danielle Martin, will be opening our CES event with a fireside chat on the evening of November 22. She will be reflecting on "Pharmacare: Getting used to disappointment. Failure and learnings from the public policy sphere." On the morning of November 23, Dr. Manu Kapur will present a keynote address on "Learning from productive failure." Dr. Naomi Steenhof will respond with her reflections on the theme. Finally, we will break into small groups to tackle some of the key issues around productive failure.
All DFCM faculty members are warmly invited to attend all or any of the sessions.
| Mon Nov 22 | 6:00-7:00 pm |
Fireside Chat - Dr. Danielle Martin, Chair, Department of Family and Community Medicine Pharmacare: Getting used to disappointment. Failure and learnings from the public policy sphere. The long and winding road that leads to universal public pharmacare in Canada is littered with cautionary lessons for leaders, educators, advocates, researchers and all those who care about equity. Dr. Martin will reflect on that history and explore some of the frameworks we can use to make sense of personal and collective failures in education and health system improvement. |
| Mon Nov 23 | 9:00-10:15 am |
Keynote Presentation - Dr. Manu Kapur, Chair of Learning Sciences & Higher Education, ETH Zurich Learning from Productive Failure If learning from failure is intuitively compelling, why do we wait for failure to happen? Dr. Kapur will describe his research on Productive Failure, where he intentionally designs for failure in initial problem-solving, and bootstraps it for learning from future instruction. Discussant: Dr. Naomi Steenhof |
| 10:15-10:30 am | Break | |
| 10:30-12:00 | Breakout groups and plenary discussion |
Dr. Danielle Martin MD, CCFP, FCFP, MPP is the Chair of the Department of Family and Community Medicine (DFCM), University of Toronto. DFCM is the largest academic department of family medicine in the world and home to the World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre on Family Medicine and Primary Care.
Dr. Martin is grounded in her clinical primary care expertise. She is an active family physician whose clinical work has ranged from comprehensive family medicine in rural and remote communities to maternity care. She is a dedicated educator, mentor and role model to learners aspiring to enter medicine and health care leadership.
Dr. Martin is a respected leader in Canadian medicine and well-recognized media spokesperson, regularly named on lists such as Medical Post’s Power List. Her 2014 presentation to a United States Senate Subcommittee about the Canadian health care system has been viewed by over 30 million people across the globe.
Dr. Martin spent eight years as a senior hospital executive, most recently as Executive Vice President and Lead Medical Executive at Women’s College Hospital (WCH), where she was also medical lead of the hospital’s COVID-19 pandemic response. At WCH, she led the establishment of Women’s Virtual, Canada’s first virtual hospital.
The recipient of many awards and accolades, in 2019 Dr. Martin became the youngest physician ever to receive the F.N.G. Starr Award, the highest honour available to Canadian Medical Association members.
Dr. Manu Kapur holds the Professorship for Learning Sciences and Higher Education at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and directs The Future Learning Initiative (FLI) at ETH Zurich. An ETH+ funded initiative, the FLI brings together more than 20 professors from 10 departments at ETH to advance research on the science of teaching and learning in higher education contexts, and translate it into the practice of teaching and learning at ETH Zurich.
Prior to this, Manu was a Professor of Psychological Studies at the Education University of Hong Kong. Manu also worked at the National Institute of Education (NIE/NTU) of Singapore as the Head of the Curriculum, Teaching and Learning Department, as well as the Head of the Learning Sciences Lab (LSL).
A mechanical engineer by bachelors training, Manu has always been passionate about mathematics. He taught college mathematics for four years, during which he was also the deputy leader for Singapore’s team to the 43rd International Mathematical Olympiad in Glasgow. It was then that his intrigue for mathematical cognition took root, which led him to pursue a doctoral degree in the science of learning (specialization in instructional technology) at Columbia University in New York. Manu holds a double Masters: a Master of Science in Applied Statistics from Columbia University in New York, and a Master of Education from the NIE, Singapore.
As a learning scientist, Manu makes a commitment not only to advancing understanding of human learning, but doing so in ways that make an impact in the actual ecologies of learning. Drawing on his engineering mindset for design, Manu conceptualized and developed the theory of Productive Failure to design for and bootstrap failure for learning mathematics better. He has done extensive work in real-field ecologies of STEM classrooms to transform teaching and learning using his theory of productive failure across a range of schools and universities in around the world.
His research on Productive Failure has been taken up by the Singapore’s Ministry of Education for wide-scale re-design and implementation of its pre-university mathematics (statistics) curriculum and pedagogy. This demonstrated Manu’s ability to build and sustain a high-quality, interdisciplinary scientific research program and work with multiple stakeholders (politicians, policy makers, funding bodies, schools) to impact not only theory but also policy and practice at the national scale.
Dr. Naomi Steenhof, RPh BScPhm MSc PhD is a pharmacist, an assistant professor in the teaching stream at the Faculty of Pharmacy at U of T, and a centre researcher at the Wilson Centre. Naomi holds an MSc from Maastricht University, and a (very recent!) PhD from the University of Toronto. During her Master's training, she completed a fellowship in health professions education research at the Wilson Centre under the supervision of Dr Nikki Woods and Dr Maria Mylopoulos. Naomi’s area of clinical expertise is in chronic pain and geriatrics and she practices as a Pharmacotherapy Specialist at the University Health Network in the Comprehensive Integrated Pain Program. Naomi’s research in education explores the crucial role of struggle in learning and understanding how conceptual knowledge development supports novice pharmacy students in clinical problem-solving.