Chapter 8: Introduction to Uncertainty Tolerance Teaching Activities

The chapters in this section are organised by health profession. Each gives an overview of how uncertainty may present within the particular health profession and priorities for preparing learners entering the field. While managing uncertainty is often listed as a health professions skill (Simpson et al., 2002; Toohey et al., 2005; Englander et al., 2013; General Medical Council, 2018; Kim & Lee, 2018; Cumming & Ross, 2007; Association of American Medical Colleges, 2024), the amount of research exploring the topic of uncertainty varies significantly across health professions. As described in Section 1, medicine and nursing have explored the topic of uncertainty tolerance to a greater extent than other health professions (Moffett et al., 2021; Papanagnou et al., 2021; Patel et al., 2022; Stephens et al., 2022). We encourage readers to consider adding to the research in other health professions as they develop and evaluate their curricula.

This section includes exemplar activities from diverse health professions and disciplines which offer practical examples of how to utilise teaching practices that foster uncertainty tolerance in health professions education. These activities are diverse in nature, suggesting that building opportunities for learners to practice managing uncertainty in health professions education are plentiful. They can be implemented as described or can be adapted for your own context. In each chapter, moderators of uncertainty tolerance are signposted for the reader to link the activity to research and theory related to the field. Because these activities are written by educators for educators, the noted moderators are typically educator-sourced. However, readers should consider the full array of moderators relevant to their context when designing an uncertainty tolerance teaching activity.

Importantly, as this field is developing, many of the included exemplar activities were initially designed to support health professions learning objectives not directly related to learner uncertainty tolerance development. As the field of research into uncertainty tolerance has progressed, with teaching practices (including stimuli and moderators) increasingly being identified, reflective teaching practice has confirmed the value of these teaching activities in fostering health professions learner uncertainty tolerance. Research has revealed that many educators engage in uncertainty tolerance teaching practices but often do so tacitly until challenged to reflect on their teaching practice (Lazarus et al., 2024).

Each exemplar includes a comprehensive description of the activity, including a facilitator guide, anticipated impacts on learners, and potential adaptations for different contexts; highlights how uncertainty is stimulated; and identifies the relevant moderators. You might begin to apply each chapter’s content to your own teaching practice as outlined below:

1. Using the Reflection to guide you, consider how the chapter’s exemplar activity could be relevant to your own teaching practice.
2. Building on the initial reflection, begin planning implementation of an activity within your teaching practice.
3. Draw on the Resources section of this handbook to develop your teaching activity further: the section includes worksheets with guidance on commencing teaching activities that stimulate uncertainty, teaching activity development, and assessment considerations, as well as reflection templates for educators and learners, and frameworks for selecting and considering moderators within the teaching activity.

We encourage you to look at exemplar activities outside the discipline you teach, as many of them can be adapted to suit multiple disciplines. The Exemplar Activity Matrix can be used for selecting an exemplar activity based on your needs. It considers the following parameters: type of activity, learning setting, uncertainty stimulus used, learner stage, health profession, and discipline.