As we go along through this very interesting course, I can't stop myself thinking about how we were taught and how we studied., as medical students and residents.
Deeply anchored in the regular activities of any medical student, there are didactical sessions, thousands of PowerPoint slides to study, and book chapters organized in a specific, non-recalling manner. We can't event think about asking teachers to change their way of teaching throughout our curriculum. Not because they would not be open, personally speaking, to hear what we have to say, but because they would not even understand, at first, that other ways are possible to implement to make teach and learn more efficient. I guess that what I am trying to explain, is the complexity in which ''regular'' teaching systems are nested. Numerous MD programs around the world have implemented problem-based learning in the curriculum. Other have implemented case-based collaborative learning, or CBCL (cf Krupat et al. 2016), which also integrates more systematically the testing effect to improve learning. But what else? Simply to implement regular meaningful active learning activities, it would mean to change important parts of that curriculum. It would mean a revolution, so to speak. Through the instruction for the last assignment, we also have been introduced to the concept of elaboration, where we recall previous learned notions in a different context, to favorise re-encoding and more connections between the learned content. This approach, that aims to interrelate different notions we learn throughout a course, is interesting and certainly reflects a higher level of meaningful learning. That being said, that level of elaboration seems to be out of reach in a usual teaching system in which schools of medicine are embedded.
In other words, changing the way we learn starts individually by changing the way we study but, collectively, it will change by the way we are taught and by the way we teach. But the teaching system is powerful to bring us back, as teachers, to formal, steady, comfortable ways of teaching. I think it will need an institutional change to really apply the principles we are learning in Teaching 100.
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