Before starting the portfolio exercise, a while ago, I had no idea of the objectives, the academic targets underpinning that weekly duty. At first, I have to be honest: I had no problem writing the posts, but it was difficult for me to focus, to concentrate on one idea and then start writing about it. I could spend hours to think about the problem, the idea I wanted to highlight, before starting to write. Gradually, it became easier to put my thoughts together and linking them with personal experiences and previous notions.
Looking back to my different posts, I notice that education has been a central theme from the very beginning. My thoughts went from teaching, to learning, and from Make it stick to pediatrics and schooling, but I kept in sight education as a theme through the process. Namely, in my first entry, I identified two main goals for Teaching 100, which were related to education as a broader idea: (1) I wanted to learn how to become a better teacher, specifically to light up my learners' curiosity, (2) I wanted to learn more about great teaching to better inform my colleagues in my institution about the importance of teaching and learning, and about education.
Throughout my portfolio posts, I reflected frequently on notions and ideas that we have discussed in breakout rooms, like if I felt the need to resume where we left. To that extent, I wrote about assessing expertise, how bad we are at assessing our own learning and effortful learning, among other topics. A few times, I linked notions I reflect on with meaningful readings I've made previoulsy, like Outliers (Gladwell), Thinking fast and slow (Kahneman) and, of course, Make it Stick (Brown, Roediger, McDaniel).
Gradually, along the semester, there were less and less questions in my different posts, and more assertions, or possible answers. Based on what we were learning during live sessions and in pre-course material, I think I gain some intuition and confidence in the way I was putting all the things together.
Interestingly (and I just realized it while reading back my entries), I repeatedly put forward the idea, directly and indirectly, that medical programs are imbedded in status quo. I am fully recognizing the importance of what we've learned so far, but supported the idea a few times, in my posts, that something has to change in order to apply these principles. In my post on October 19, I even wrote about the necessity of an institutional change to let meaningful teaching and learning really be part of medical schools.
As we were advancing through the content during the last few weeks, I got closer to my syllabus in the ideas I highlighted, probably because the assignment due date is coming! I wrote more specifically about biases, inclusive teaching and emotions in learning. Gradually, I was also sticking more closely to the notions we learned, by recalling and synthesizing them in my posts.
Finally, I have never linked what we've learned to my profession, pediatrics, until the very last post. In that post, I managed to link teachers, learners and emotions to children's school performance, and the way we can help them better develop a growth mindset. I think I tried not to link peds to teaching, as I like to separate my clinical duties from my academic duties (medical education). That being said, maybe that last post reminded my that it is fundamentally impossible.
I really liked that exercise and I am thriving to talk more about metacognition reflection during our next live session.
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