For some time now, I have been contemplating the kinds of questions we ask in health professions education (HPE). These ruminations began in 2010 when I was working on a paper about my medical school’s efforts to implement an educational innovation. Truth be told, I had a real problem. My study was supposed to be an evaluation of the innovation’s implementation; however, the data highlighted all the workarounds we constructed to make the innovation fit within our contextual constraints. How could I evaluate our implementation of the innovation when I was no longer confident that what we had implemented was still an exemplar of the original innovation?I found myself asking questions like: Why do we value this innovation? Why is our implementation an example of the innovation at work? How much can I change the innovation before I turn it into something else?

I started searching the literature to find insights into these questions. Surely other HPE scholars have had similar concerns. Surely I would not be the first to venture down this rabbit hole. Right

Even though it seems classes just started, it is time to prepare for mid-semester evaluations. Unlike evaluations at the end of the semester, mid-semester evaluations are great tools to provide feedback to the instructor in time for adjustments to be made. This semester, consider a SGID—Small Group Instructional Diagnosis. A SGID is a short, 20-minute formative assessment activity that involves having a trained facilitator meet with student focus groups to discuss what’s working, what needs improvement, possible changes to the course, and how students see they are meeting course learning objectives. 

Inclusive Learning

On April 5^th, 2019, I had the pleasure of attending a workshop, “Building an Inclusive Classroom,” sponsored by the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning at Stanford University. The guest speaker was Sherryl Broverman, PhD, from the Duke Global Health Institute and Duke University Department of Biology. Everything that follows is credited to her and represents a tiny glimpse into her outstanding presentation.

The workshop started with the class divided into groups of 5-7 individuals that were given arts and crafts supplies and asked to complete a creative task. When finished, we compared our work between the tables and noticed striking differences. Dr. Broverman set the stage for our discussion by asking, “How do we organize our classrooms so that teaching activities, student performance, and evaluations don’t codify and reinforce existing privilege and social capital?”

Some students did not understand the prompt that described the assigned task.

Some groups were given more supplies than others. They completed more intricate and interesting crafts than groups with less resources.

A foundational principle of the Harvard Macy Institute (HMI) is to build and nurture collaborations to foster cross disciplinary learning and problem solving. Early collaborations begun with the plans described in the 1994 successful grant submission to the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, which laid the foundation for our 26 year collaborations with faculty at the Harvard Medical School, the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the Harvard Business School. The Macy Foundation’s assumption was that neither institution would be as successful working in isolation as they would be in partnership. This blog post tells the story of another fruitful collaboration - one in which health professions educators and museum educators collaborated to design a new fellowship, sponsored jointly with the Cambridge Health Alliance and now part of the HMI course portfolio.

Since as early as the 1880s, psychologists studying human memory generated “forgetting curves” which attempt to illustrate memory retention over time. It is thought that adults retain less than 30% of lecture-based content which diminishes over time, and yet this is still a commonly used platform for teaching in medical education. At my institution, our radiology residents receive nearly two hours of dedicated teaching each day, at least half of which is lecture-based didactics. I vividly remember sitting through those 45-minute lectures as a resident, often after lunch, struggling to pry my eyes open.