Persona-Driven Vignettes: A Novel Needs Assessment and Audit Tool for Faculty Development

Prompted by COVID-19, an academic health sciences center’s health professions faculty development office underwent a digital transformation in 2020. This disruption afforded an opportunity to launch a new approach to comprehensive and rapid needs assessment. An inter-professional team of health professions educators used a novel storytelling technique to design vignettes featuring fictionalized personas representative of a diverse faculty. Faculty members from a spectrum of teaching practices created vignettes about fictionalized personas based on their lived experiences as faculty. The resulting document was peer reviewed by faculty development team members. Learning objectives were distilled from the vignettes and compiled into a list of items. Redundant items were removed. The items were further analyzed and indexed to reflect the natural life cycle of a faculty member, from recruitment to retirement. Finally, the team reviewed the items and identified resources to address them. Faculty members created a compilation document that described seven unique faculty journeys through a series of persona-driven vignettes. From this document, three co-authors identified and articulated a collection of learning objectives. After review, 70 learning objectives remained. Most learning objectives (69%, 48/70) could be fully or partially addressed by existing faculty development resources, either locally curated or openly accessible in the literature or online. This process revealed that several gaps in faculty development resources (31%, 22/70) required creation, adaptation, or revision of content. Using this “vignettes” method, the authors quickly identified gaps in the current resource bank. Like a road map, the list of items defines our tasks to work toward a comprehensive faculty development resource and assess our team’s progress. This method of rapid needs assessment can be replicated in other institutions.