Individual Coping to Collective Growth: A Low-Resource Strategy for People Development

Background
Health professions educators face increasing strain from workforce shortages, funding constraints, sociopolitical uncertainty, and expanding expectations. These pressures often magnify isolation and overreliance on individual resilience, despite evidence that complex challenges are better addressed through collective approaches. Calls for new team structures in medical education emphasize the importance of shared learning, psychological safety, and distributed expertise. Our aim was to pilot a scalable, low resource model for Faculty Development programming that would foster collective wisdom and offer practical strategies to navigate complexity while maintaining agency, connection, and incremental professional growth.

Methods
This educational innovation involved a year long micro learning campaign designed to move faculty development from individual coping toward collective growth. Weekly short form videos sent to our faculty email distribution list and archived on an intranet repository highlighted a single, practical strategy shared by faculty peers. Videos were intentionally low production and locally generated to build trust, reinforce authenticity, and surface diverse perspectives within our organization.
Monthly in person gatherings complemented the videos, forming an informal community of practice centered on dialogue, reflection, and shared sense making. Sessions emphasized mutual engagement, cross role interprofessional learning, and collective problem solving rather than expert driven instruction. An embedded evaluation strategy included brief written reflections collected during gatherings, documenting participants’ intended behavioral changes and perceived value of the collective learning experience.
A third program component was a series of monthly small group mentoring sessions with three faculty attendees selected from the monthly gatherings and one institutional leader.
To understand the impact of this pilot, we noted quantitative viewership data from each video, and analyzed qualitative data from responses to videos, conversations and written reflections from in-person gatherings, and feedback from leaders and participants at the mentoring sessions.

Results / Outcomes
Preliminary findings indicate strong participant intentions toward personal and professional behavior change, with frequent references to accountability, shared motivation, and reduced feelings of isolation. Reflections emphasized the value of hearing from peers across roles, reinforcing the idea that improvement is cumulative and community driven. Attendance patterns relative to that of our traditional programming trends suggest sustained engagement across the academic year, despite minimal financial or administrative resources.

Discussion
This project demonstrates how intentionally designed programmatic efforts can cultivate collective wisdom during times of systemic strain. By pairing peer generated micro learning with community dialogue, this pilot initiative shifted faculty development from an individual expert model toward shared ownership of growth. For people-developers across health sciences education, this approach offers a transferable framework for designing teams that support resilience, incremental improvement, and collaboration in complex environments.
Our pilot represents one iteration of continual experimentation in Faculty Development programming. Data collection and analysis were limited by the tools available to our team at the time of the pilot. Future directions may include additional longitudinal evaluation, specifically tied to defined and validated metrics of employee vitality, engagement, belonging, and/or productivity.
This session will invite participants to consider how collective wisdom can be intentionally leveraged to grow the health sciences education workforce of the future.