The American Association of Colleges of Osteopathic Medicine annual conference was packed full of thought-provoking sessions, including an interesting discussion on Design Thinking.

It’s rare to read past a healthcare headline these days without encountering the word “integration” in some phrase or other, from vertical or horizontal integration; to clinical, economic or data integration. And the word’s ubiquity makes sense. Everything about U.S. healthcare is complex, from the problems it’s required to solve and the fragmented “system” through which care is funded and delivered, to the regulations intended to promote care quality, cost effectiveness and access. So it’s intuitive that industry managers pursuing ambitious goals would strive to get people, processes and resources working in alignment toward them. 

We are all leaders! Health care professionals, whether nurses, pharmacists, physicians, physical therapists, or others, are all leaders at different times. Health care is complex, and all of us must be humble enough to recognize that there are times when we should let someone else lead. While not all of us will take on formal leadership roles such as deans, department chiefs, or program directors, all of us will lead in some capacity. We will, at a minimum, lead our own clinical teams and, of course, our patients. Despite the fact that we are all going to be leaders, there remains a paucity of education dedicated to leadership development for entry level positions and, in particular, graduate medical education. While there are resources for those assuming titled leadership positions, for many who are leading on a daily basis there is a gap in leadership training. Moreover, we should not wait until people are put in positions of leadership to develop their leadership skills. This so-called accidental leadership (the leadership skills we learn simply by taking part in our jobs) development model needs to change.

Based on my date of birth I am a millennial. Although I am in no way an expert, I grew up using technology and am comfortable utilizing it in my teaching. What more did I really need to know? Prior to taking the Harvard Macy Institute 2.0 course, a friend cynically asked me: What are you really going to learn from a technology education course? How to do a PowerPoint presentation? Do you really think you are going to get something out of it? Reflecting back on those words after finishing the course I would confidently answer: That, and much, much more. 

Flipping the classroom with team-based learning (TBL) is becoming common practice in medical education.  Key to its success as a learner-centered teaching strategy is its scalability to large classrooms through the employment of high-performing learner teams, requiring less faculty time/numbers compared to other learner-centered strategies such as problem-based or case-based learning.  Individual learners are motivated to come to class prepared by both a readiness assurance process (i.e., quiz) and team accountability.  Class time is then focused on application of knowledge through problem solving and clinical reasoning. 

Compared to traditional teaching strategies such as lecture, TBL not only significantly increases knowledge scores¹, but also offers opportunities for developing and measuring competencies of contemporary healthcare such as professionalism, communication, team work, and even team reflexivity². As a pedagogical framework, TBL further facilitates integration of additional teaching strategies³ to optimize learning, retention, and teaching satisfaction.  As an opportunity for scholarship, there is a dearth of flipped classroom literature reporting measurement of outcomes other than knowledge gains.  So why not flip for TBL?

Check out the TBL Collaborative, MedEdPortal, or the following resources to get started!

1. Fatmi M, Hartling L, Hillier T, Campbell S, Oswald AE. The effectiveness of team-based learning on learning outcomes in health professions education: BEME Guide No. 30. Med Teach. 2013. Nov;35:1608-1624. Doi: 10.3109/0142159X.2013.849802. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24245519
2. Schmutz JB, Kolbe M, Eppich WJ. Twelve tips for integrating team reflexivity into your simulation-based team training. Med Teach. 2018. Apr:1-7. doi: 10.1080/0142159X.2018.1464135.https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29703126
3. Domans D, Michaelsen L, van Merrienboer J, van der Vleuten C. Should we choose between problem-based learning and team-based learning? No, combine the best of both worlds! Med Teach. 2015. Apr;39(4):354-359. doi: 10.3109/0142159X.2014.948828. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25154342 

Leah Sheridan, PhD, is a medical educator in physiology. Leah currently holds a position as Associate Lecturer at Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine. Leah’s areas of professional interest include teaching effectiveness, assessment for learning, and pedagogy. Leah can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..