December 2024: Deborah Schwengel

Tip of the Month: Remember what it is like to be a novice. Cognitive load is high and might be difficult to navigate. My tip: Try learning something new, something challenging that forces you to remember the challenges of being a novice. Then, approach your novice learners with patient understanding rather than an expectation of instant mastery.

November 2024: Sammy Zakaria

Tips of the Month:

• Teach at the bedside. Your learners remember patient stories, and your applied medical knowledge to care for them.
• Let your learners know when creating a teaching moment. This triggers learning, and long-term retention of data and clinical practices.
• Be humble and willing to learn. You will learn much more from your patients and learners than you will teach them.

September 2024: David Kern

Tip of the Month: I am following up on Tina Zhang’s tip of the month (May 2024) about creating a supportive learning environment.  On a clinical rotation, begin by explicitly addressing the learning environment and creating a learning community (Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach). Put forth your ideas, invite input from other, set mutual expectations, then follow up. A few examples of how your behavior can contribute to building a supportive learning community: (1) acknowledge that we are all learners, with varying degrees of experience and expertise, who can learn from one another; (2) focus upon what is important for patient care, not what you know most about; (3) be humble: demonstrate not knowing something, regularly using resources (online, colleagues, consultants, etc.) to efficiently find, share, and evaluate possible answers.  You will find others then doing the same, admitting not knowing something and feeling responsible for asking and finding the answer.  You may be surprised how much these simple actions help make the learning environment safe, fun, and focused on identifying important unknowns that, when addressed, improve patient care. These actions will reveal and role model your expertise in making clinical decisions and delivering the best patient care.

July 2024: David Zee

Tip of the Month: KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE: When speaking (and usually using a PowerPoint presentation) to a group whose first language is not English: Speak slowly without complicated sentences or unusual, highfalutin words. Give in your introduction a road map of the talk. Intersperse throughout the talk word slides that convey brief points to remember, e.g., “Clinical Pearl”, or “Remember:” or “Note”.  At the end of your talk, use a conclusion slide, which contains up to five but no more, take home messages.  Tell them what you want them to remember. One more on Know your audience, When teaching to a residents from another specialty, make sure some of your teaching is targeted to their interests. For example, if a resident from internal medicine is rotating on neurology and you find out their goal is to become a gastroenterologist, teach them the neurology of the GI tract, e.g. tabes, porphyria, lead poisoning, and mitochondrial and autoimmune diseases that affect both the brain and the GI tract.

June 2024: Sean Tackett

Tip of the Month: Think like a scientist. Be systematic in preparing for educational experiences. Gather data to assess learning objectives and evaluate your teaching. Every educational experience is an experiment, and you're always trying to learn from each one. Most importantly, science is about humility and testing assumptions. Avoid assumptions by asking learners what they know and/or how they're feeling, and be transparent to avoid incorrect assumptions about yourself. This can foster trust and a freedom to be vulnerable and make mistakes, which are key ingredients for learning.

May 2024: Tina Zhang

Tip of the Month: Prioritize creating a supportive learning environment for your learners. This will be crucial to your success as an educator, whether you are teaching in the classroom or leading a team on the wards. With a positive learning environment, learners are more likely to engage in thoughtful reflection, ask questions, and embrace growth mindset thinking. Creating a safe space will allow learners to explore, struggle, reflect, and grow without fear of judgement. To do this, try to set clear and realistic expectations at the beginning, promote open communication, and provide frequent observation and formative feedback for learners.

April 2024: Charles Locke

Tip of the Month: When attending on one of the teachings services, on morning rounds ask the presenting intern to present from memory, and ask another to pull up the H& P on a WOW.  Tell the presenting intern that it is not a memory contest, just present as much as they remember and they can ask their fellow intern at the WOW as reference for any data they can’t remember.

The presenting interns almost always do a really good job; they remember all the important stuff, they leave out a lot of the extraneous information and the presentation ends up being more focused and concise.  It also makes one of the other interns (the one at the WOW) actively involved in the presentation.

March 2024: Mary Newman

Tip of the month: Meet your students where they are! Learn who they are, where they are headed, and what is hard for them. Ask questions that no one else is asking them. Listen before you teach. You’ll be an excellent teacher before you know it.

Learn more about Dr. Newman

February 2024: Jed Wolpaw

Tip of the Month: One of the most powerful things you can do for a learner is tell them about your mistakes.  Tell them about a time you failed.  Tell them about a time when something went wrong, and a patient got hurt.  If we, as educators and leaders, don’t tell them these stories, then when it happens to them, and it will happen to them at some point, they will think something is wrong with them.  They will think they are not good enough to be a doctor.  But if they hear our stories, then maybe they will come to us instead of quitting, and say, “Remember what you told me? It happened to me too.” And we can help them to avoid being a second victim, and to grow and learn, rather than shrivel and fold, from their mistake.

Watch the video. 

Learn more about Dr. Wolpaw.

January 2024: Jay Baraban

Tip of the Month: Stories inspire.  Consider taking the time to tell a story that illustrates the creativity or serendipity that led to a key discovery central to your lecture.  Rather than distracting from the core material, a well-placed anecdote gives students a hook that helps them latch onto a key lesson. Years later, students tell me that these stories stick with them and have often piqued their interest in learning more.    

Watch the video.

Learn more about Dr. Baraban.