Ashwini M. Niranjan-Azadi, MD
- Wellness and Faculty Development Director, Division of Hospital Medicine
- Assistant Professor of Medicine
Educator of the Month
April 2025: Ashwini Niranjan-Azadi
Tip of the month: Adult learning theory notes the importance of allowing learners to set self-directed goals. The use of SMART goals allows our learners to share their goals with us and also allows us to focus our feedback. Whether you are spending one hour or a one month with a learner, ask them to set a goal that is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely to enhance their learning experience. If a learner gives you a goal that does not meet this criteria, help them tailor the goal.
IEE Educator of Month: April 2025 Ashwini M. Niranjan-Azadi, MD
March 2025: Edward Kuwera
Tip of the Month: Tell a Story and Repeat It - In my experience, regardless of age or level of training, many people benefit from storytelling as a method of teaching and learning. So many of us enjoy books, movies, and video games in large part because of a well told story. It’s much easier to recall information that flows in a series of events, rather than rote memorization. When learning, try to incorporate the information in a way that forms a story – whether visual, audio, or whatever combination of senses works best with your memory. For me, a combination of audio and visual works well. Once you know the story – repeat it and continually add details as needed.
Let’s take an example: The story of congestive heart failure - instead of memorizing that liver cirrhosis is a complication of CHF, imagine a movie playing of the heart beating weakly, blood pooling, causing backflow as it increases pressure in the liver. You see the liver expand and mottle, gradually changing in appearance, scarring into a cirrhotic state. If you missed something in the story, it’s easy to fill in a detail – further backflow will go into the legs and you now see the skin discolor, turning into stasis dermatitis. This process can work even with complex information. Storytelling with repetition can be extremely useful and I highly encourage you try it if you haven’t already!
IEE Educator of the Month: March 2025
Edward Kuwera, MD
- Fellowship Program Director - Pediatric Ophthalmology & Adult Strabismus
- Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology
February 2025: Sharon Bord
Tip of the Month: On my first rotation in medical school a classmate and co-rotator said to our surgery attending, "We may be wearing blue scrubs, but we are really green." I had been so nervous about being in the OR that day, but when she said that it set the stage for our day and expectations from our faculty member. It allowed us all to take a deep sigh of relief and to get the most out of our learning environment.
It is important for us as educators to remember what it feels like to be at different stages of learning and to understand the stresses as well as triumphs that our learners are hoping to experience. I think we can all recall some of our first days on clinical rotations in medical school, or the first weeks of residency, and the nervous excitement that went along with it. By putting ourselves in the mindset of our learners we can best meet them where they are at in their learning journey and allow them to feel comfortable in taking risks and engaging with the team.
IEE Educator of Month: February 2025 Sharon Bord, MD
January 2025: Charlene Gamaldo
Tip of the Month: Remember that no 2 teaching experiences are ever the same, even if you are teaching the same material because your learners are different. With that in mind, strive to personalize the experience to the learning preference and the educational goals of your learner so they feel engaged and invested in the process. This partnership will increase the likelihood that the mutual goals of both educator and learner are achieved.
Charlene Gamaldo, MD
- Vice Chair, Faculty Development, Department of Neurology, Associate Vice Provost, Johns Hopkins University Provost’s Leadership, Advancement and Development (L.A.D.) Academy
- Professor of Neurology
2024
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Watch the video. -
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.
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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. -
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.
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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. -
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.
2023
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Tip of the Month: When caring for patients with a chronic condition, have students ask about how the condition presented (even if it is not the focus of the encounter) and the path to diagnosis. It is in this way that they learn the "stories" that precede the diagnoses.
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Tip of the Month: Take a minute out of every day you are working with learners to give feedback. Small or large scale of the feedback matters less. Make the act of giving the feedback a habit that you do every day.
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