In general, as I have progressed through my education, I have felt that the quality of education has been on a downward vector.
- I believe that duty hour work restrictions have diminished continuity of care and reduced the drive for residents to read and learn about their patients, because the patients feel less like “their patients.”
- I think the emphasis on fraud prevention that has meant that attendings need to see and be present for all of the meaningful aspects of patient encounters has diminished fellow autonomy and delayed the maturation process that senior residents and fellows undergo.
- I think the addition of alternative medicine curriculum to medical schools is an inexcusable retreat from the goal of medical scientists.
But I have recently experienced a vision for the future of medical education at Oakland University William Beaumont Medical school and I am blown away. Don’t worry future doctors are going to be just fine.
OUWB is one of the newest medical schools in the country and has it’s first two classes of medical students enrolled, classes of 2015 and 2016. The second years are finishing up the renal section. It is an integrated unit including histology, pathology, physiology and pathophysiology. I was privileged to have an integral role in developing the curriculum. One of the parts that I spent hours on was developing Team Based Learning modules (TBL).
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| Typical MD Lab from Scott Hall (http://conjoint.med.wayne.edu/mdlabs.php) |
Team based learning is OUWB’s version of the small group learning sessions that have always been a part of the first two years of medical school. During my years at Wayne State they were called MD Labs. The sessions were sprinkled through out the curricula. I went to a few and they were of widely variable quality. I didn’t go to many, because they didn’t count toward your grade. That told me that The Dean didn’t think they were important enough to count so I took the hint spent my limited hours cranking on stuff that counted.
The TBL is a reinterpretation of those small group sessions that I see as wildly successful. The success is not by accident and comes from the novel structure of the sessions. A TBL is made up of preparation and three segments:
Prep
Individual Readiness Assessment Test (iRAT)
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| Gunning for grades on the iRAT |
Team Readiness Assessment Test (tRAT)
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| If you scratch off three horse shoes you win $60. |
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| Look at her notes. Every tricky nephrology question starts with “let’s draw a nephron.” |
Application Exercise
The things I love about the TBL
- It is part of the grade. Curriculum directors need to understand that the medical school curriculum has more information than is possible to learn and students are rational actors. They will sacrifice important but uncounted learning opportunities in order to prepare for counted exams. There is no way to make something meaningful without making it part of the grade.
- The iRAT happens right when the students walk in to the room. I love how this makes it clear that the students are being graded on preparation. The important thing is getting the students to learn the material before the session starts. This paragraph from Regis School of pharmacy states it perfectly:
“To promote active and collaborative learning, students are sometimes asked to work in groups in class or on projects outside of class. While group work does benefit student learning, unfortunately it is often plagued by “social loafers”, or students who do not pull their weight in terms of helping the group. As a result, many students learn to dislike group work and may seek to avoid it. TBL is different. TBL ensures that each member of the team is held accountable for their own learning outside of class. Students who do not prepare adequately before class will perform poorly on the iRAT and will not be able to contribute in a meaningful manner to the tRAT and application exercises. As a result, most students who would normally remain “social loafers” in a group learning project are instead quickly motivated to do the assigned work out of class in order to perform well on the iRAT. In addition, as teams work together and compete with other teams in the class, loyalty to the team develops among each member. This further motivates the “social loafers” to prepare outside of class so that they can contribute and help the team succeed.“
In the cut throat world of medical school any system that allowed a “social loafer” to benefit from the group while contributing nothing would be a recipe for a short lived project. The iRAT gives a clear message: come to class prepared, or you will suffer.
- The application exercises are open google. To me, this was the most interesting part of TBL. Clinical medicine is, of course, open book. Everyday I am consulting Dr. Google, Epocrates and UpToDate. My information gathering strategies were developed on the fly in my clinical practice. No one taught me these types of skills and no where in medical school were there any opportunities to practice hone them. The students of OUWB are working together, comparing notes, seeing which resources work best. I heard students explain the virtues of DynaMed (a POS in my opinion). I spoke with students who distanced themselves from Wikipedia until I told them I was a fan and had no reservations about using the crowd sourced encyclopedia. After hearing me extol its virtues they quickly changed their tune and agreed that it was easy to filter good from bad wiki pages (referenced, with mainstream journals, avoid political topics) and that the good ones never steered them wrong.
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| People used, Google, Wikipedia, UpToDate and a strange resource called a “book” |
Summary
The portable computer revolution of iPads and smart phones allows us to bring the library to the bedside, it is time for medical schools to appreciate and embrace this pivot in the history if medicine. TBLs are the best example I have seen of of this.
