The Harvard Macy Institute is a dedicated community of practice with more than 5600 alumni from 81 countries worldwide. We work hard to keep our community connected online, and one of our special initiatives is our annual #HMICommunity Day. This year, we celebrate 25 years of the Harvard Macy Institute with deepest gratitude to our worldwide community of healthcare professionals transforming education and healthcare delivery.

Please join us TODAY, August 13th for #HMICommunity Day - a virtual celebration of our worldwide community of practice! As alumni and friends, join us in showing support for our organization by tagging us in a photo and/or message on one of our three social media platforms – Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn – and letting us know what the Harvard Macy Institute means to you. Please tag all messages with our hashtag #HMICommunity, and the hashtag of courses you have attended - #HMIEducators, #HMIAssessment, #HMILeaders, or #HMIHCE.

Thank you for helping us celebrate our worldwide community!

I was flying to join my wife in San Diego, California while she was attending a conference on ocean planning. For those of you not familiar with ocean planning, it is the process of analyzing ocean resources and ocean use. The most important thing about it is that the people who do it usually have conferences in beautiful, often warm and always ocean-adjacent locations. I sat in my seat and reached for the airline magazine. The first article was about medical education and how many medical schools were switching to this new concept of the “flipped classroom.” It highlighted the University of Vermont as well as Harvard Medical School, and how they changed the old model of sitting in a large auditorium, listening for hours on end to someone who had incredible amounts of expertise and information, because they had found learners had trouble committing this information to long-term memory and applying it to new settings. How could this be? The lecture format is the tried and true educational experience. The idea of the “sage in the stage” started with the very advent of universities as far back as 1050 AD. This was the “way it was done.” Why then were these medical colleges completing overhauling the way they teach medicine?

If you have not yet worked with an instructional designer, it may be worth exploring such a resource at your institution to leverage your teaching with the help of relevant technology to enhance the educational experience. With remarkable advancements in educational technologies over the last decade, most, if not all, educational interactions taking place today incorporate some form of digital interaction for students, staff and faculty. As of fall 2016, there were over 6.3 million students taking at least one distance education course, comprising 31.6% of all higher education enrollments. And specifically in nursing education, 82.9 percent of nursing students report that the use of technology enhances their learning, and 79.6 percent say that technology helps them better prepare for future careers. These technologies appear in many forms during the educational career of a health care professional -  whether it is the use of a learning management system (LMS), creating and interacting with video tutorials, participating in simulated scenarios, using different assessment tools, participating in peer evaluations …and the list goes on. Gaming tools and mixed reality applications are not far behind! As indicated by the recent 2019 Horizon Report, “mixed reality and artificial intelligence are forecast to be important to teaching, learning and creative inquiry in the future.”

At the 2019 IAMSE conference in Roanoke, Virginia a collaborative group of Central Group on Educational Affairs and Southern Group on Educational Affairs members facilitated an interactive workshop on implementing a Peer Observation of Instruction program. The process proposed is similar to the findings reported by Adriane Bell, Holly Meyer and Lauren Maggio this month in Teaching and Learning in Medicine. They found that most peer observation programs are voluntary and provide formative feedback with the sole purpose of teaching improvement. They also found that most programs use a three-phase process with a pre-observation meeting for goal setting, direct observation of teaching, and a post-observation meeting with feedback. The IAMSE workshop leveraged the Peer Observation of Teaching Handbook by Lori Newman, David Roberts, and Richard Schwartzstein.

After reflecting on the two years we spent at the Harvard Macy Institute Program for Educators in the Health Professions course as learners and teachers, it became more apparent that health professions educators cannot just talk about collaborative learning methods. Instead, we must figure out a way to incorporate these pearls into our everyday practice to promote effective teaching and learning throughout the medical education continuum. During our time at the course, we have seen that by weaving collaborative learning methods into the delivery of education, knowledge is fostered, teamwork is promoted, and a true excitement for learning new concepts occurs. One challenge that may impede us from implementing collaborative learning methods into our own teaching strategies is lack of time; however, to be the change agents that healthcare needs, we have a duty to better prepare our learners for their future role as healthcare providers. How do we do this? The answer may not be that difficult. In fact, by using collaborative learning methods, you may find that students develop a deeper understanding as they practice synthesizing and applying healthcare concepts.