Table 1.

Barriers to facilitating active learning strategies in resident conferences

Barriers	Faculty quotation
Setting barriers
Large auditorium	‘The problem with trying to break it up and promote discussion is that there are about 50 people in the room, and you might want to encourage more interaction, but the more you ask, I just think the more difficult it will be for the residents…It just gives them more opportunity to feel anxious about public speaking’.
Seats organized in rows	‘The room is already set up in a way that is anti-interaction, like most lecture rooms are. All the chairs are in a straight row and everyone is facing forward, and most of the people sit in the back’.
Interruptions	‘If you want to develop groups that interact together, and people come in late and they leave early, they get paged, I think that's a challenge’.
Faculty barriers
Formulating good questions	‘I think the hardest thing for people to do [in facilitating active learning] is to develop good questions’.
Reworking established lectures	‘There are a lot of people who do noon conference every year and they do the same topic, and then you are going to ask them to change it and it is going to be uncomfortable and it will take extra work’.
Giving up control of the learning environment	‘You lose control. The more interactive, the more you let the audience go, and if you have teaching goals you want to accomplish, that could work out but it is just a little bit more risky’.
Lack of training	‘You will need faculty development or guidelines. It would be a fair amount of training for someone who hasn't done it before’.
Resident Barriers
Residency culture and resident buy-in	‘… changing the residency culture and getting the residents to buy in, participate and stay—you wouldn't want them to know they now have to participate and have them not come’.

In this table, we outline the barriers that faculty describe for facilitating active learning strategies in resident conferences.