COACHING for peak professional performance is making a strong appearance in academic health science organizations.  But, use of the word coaching can be confusing with so many applications including life coaching, academic coaching, and peer coaching. 

During AMEE 2017 there were a few recurring concepts. One of them was Equity and how we, within health professions education, can both be more aware of our own biases and promote equity in health professions education. The subject resonated with a lot of us HMI alumni that attended the conference and we decided to see what our HMI community thought via our September Tweet Chat. 

The Harvard Macy Institute would like to thank our alumni, Eric Gantwerker, Atipong Pathanasethpong, and Arabella Simpkin, for co-authoring this blog.

A buzz of activity and energized bodies met us as we arrived for the Association for Medical Education in Europe (AMEE) 2017 pre-conference in Helsinki on faculty development. Recognizing the importance of faculty development in medical education, this pre-conference is in its 4th year with thought leaders from throughout the globe. Overall, there is no doubt “faculty development” was among the highlights at AMEE 2017, with 5 major trends coming to the forefront, which we detail below:

When I started working on the SaudiMED Framework project one year ago, I didn’t know that I would be working with all the medical and basic science department supervisors, coordinators, physicians and instructors! The project was intended to align the all course objectives with the SaudiMED competencies, in order to develop blueprints.

How do we help students make learning “stick”?  Retrieval-based learning may be the answer.  Purdue researcher Jeffrey Karpicke, PhD, studies how the mind and memory work and suggests that repeated, spaced retrieval leads to greater learning results.  This approach to learning could influence curriculum design, learning session organization, and assessment activities. 

When medical students matriculate they are somewhere between child (pedagogy) and adult (andragogy) learners.  We assume adults learn differently than children because they’ve had more life experiences, are motivated by their perceptions and personal needs, have an interest to direct their learning experiences, and have greater needs to apply learning in and to specific contexts.

Feedback conversations have fascinated me for nearly a decade. It is an undisputed opinion that feedback is the cornerstone of performance assessment and growth. Experts have been writing about this topic for decades. If we go outside the health professions education world, the business literature also abounds in feedback; they tend to focus on performance ‘appraisal’ and why it is important to have regular conversations on this topic with their employees. Business organizations are serious about performance of their teams and regular appraisal conversations are essential for effective teamwork.

So why do health professions educators continue to view upcoming feedback conversations with trepidation? And why do our learners at every level continue to disparage the quality of feedback provided to them? These adult learners are intelligent professionals who should be calibrating their own performance astutely and accurately and seeking feedback regularly- but are they?

This blog originally appeared The Medical Educator Blog on June 13, 2017 and is republished here with permission http://www.themedicaleducator.com/blog/950165/all-a-twitter-5-tips-to-build-your-twitter-presence-as-a-medical-educator

A few years ago, my husband noted that more and more professional conferences had hashtags and suggested it might be wise for the two of us as early career academics to grow our professional Twitter presence. Admittedly, it took me a while to get on board as I’m not always an “early adopter” and I wasn’t quite sure how using Twitter would benefit me professionally. At times, the constant feed of new tweets seemed overwhelming and I wasn't sure who to follow or what to tweet about. With the added challenge of a 140-character limit I felt like I was learning a new language! As I became more and more engaged – and more users started following me – my confidence grew. After time and practice I'm now connected with medical educators from all over the world, and I recognize that Twitter offers an expansive network of professionals and colleagues at my fingertips for guidance and expertise. Since the first steps are often the hardest to take, I have compiled a few tips and tricks you can use to make the most of your Twitter presence as a medical educator.

Why is the most powerful word in education. Asking why is a mark of curiosity, the strongest intrinsic motivating factor. It forces people to find answers and ultimately ask more questions. It drives people to endlessly pursue knowledge. It, along with its cousins what and how, have driven scientists and researchers for centuries. What seeks to identify the element responsible for a given phenomenon. How is asked to better understand the processes that underpin a phenomenon. But why is the question that is asked when people want to utilize critical thinking. Why does not seek simple answers, rather it asks a fundamental characteristic that entrains judgement, reasoning, and logic.  Why beckons itself for someone with wisdom, experience and insight to bring reason and logic out of uncertainty. 

The Peer Observation of Teaching Handbook

A group of faculty developers have come together to carry on a tradition started by Steve Davis, to highlight faculty development resources and strategies each month.

This month we are highlighting a wonderful resource available in MedEdPortal, The Peer Observation of Teaching Handbook written by Lori R. Newman, David H. Roberts, and Richard M. Schwartzstein from Harvard Medical School (2012).  We are also hoping to extend an engaging conversation in Twitter at #MedEdPearls. 

The following blog has been co-authored by the CareForward Team of Senthil Rajasekaran, Lauren Mazzurco, Christine Matson, Don Robison, Anca Dobrian, Marta Ambrozewicz, Raja Koteeswaran, Mekbib Gemeda, Cindy Cadieux, Carrie Elzie, Arun Mohanram and April Pace

It seems like American Healthcare has been in “crisis mode” since 1900s. Despite so many advances, little has changed in controlling cost and improving value and health outcomes. Even though there is plenty of evidence to suggest that clinical care at its best contributes to only 20% of patient health outcomes and a whopping 80% is determined by socioeconomic and behavioral factors, little is done in medical education to address the 80%. Recently we are witnessing a welcome trend, where undergraduate (UME) and graduate medical education (GME) are seen as part of this solution. At Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS) we have implemented our new CareForward curriculum to teach cost, value, and health system sciences in the UME. Realizing the challenges in effectively integrating these complex topics in UME, our team at EVMS has created a set of virtual families, members of which will be represented in the clinical cases that are used in the UME curriculum. These virtual families represent diverse patient populations (e.g., age, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, culture, belief system, literacy level, socioeconomic status and geography), and introduce variables such as veteran affairs, family dynamics, financial turbulence, health equity/disparity, roles within a care delivery team, access to community resources, interactions of organizations and complexities of care in specific patient populations. Each organ system module and clerkship will use longitudinal clinical cases that are drawn from the virtual families.

Please note that this blog was originally posted on www.christenseninstitute.org on May 4, 2017

People use the term “Disruptive Innovation” to mean a lot of different things, but it actually has a very specific definition. Disruptive Innovation is not the kind of innovation that makes good products better. It’s the kind that takes a product that’s historically been so expensive and complicated or inconvenient that few people can use it, and transforms it into one that’s so simple and affordable that a great many can do so. Examples include TurboTax tax preparation software, which disrupted accountants, and Netflix, which disrupted retail video stores.

Just like how it takes a village to raise a child, it also takes a community to raise a tweet chat.

 On the morning of May 3rd, I checked Twitter for the announcement of the May Harvard Macy (HMI) tweet chat. I typed in #hmichat and right at the top of the results I found the announcement. I read on - the session would be led by Andrew Linn, Brent Thoma, and Zineb Nouns. I had no idea who these people were, but that's the great thing about HMI chat.

Since the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) launched the IHI Open School in 2008, more than 1,500 universities and hospitals have integrated the IHI Open School online courses into curricula and training programs to bring essential skills in quality improvement and patient safety to students, trainees, and all levels of staff. Based on lessons and advice from hundreds of educators, the new IHI Open School Faculty Guide: Best Practices in Curriculum Integration offers a roadmap to building a quality and safety training program with help from the Open School courses.