Category: Personal Teaching Philosophy

Introduction & Personal Teaching Philosophy

On By richardosbornemedportalcaIn Personal Teaching Philosophy, ReflectionsLeave a comment

Last edited: 1 August 2019

Hello and welcome to my e-portfolio! As I’ve transitioned from my role as a hospital medicine fellow to an academic hospitalist, I’ve had the opportunity to develop my teaching skills both in the clinical setting and, more systematically, through the completion of INTAPT and my practicum. What follows is an introduction to the teaching philosophy that has informed my work in both courses.

I decided to pursue a ‘teaching Masters’ because I believe in the transactional nature of medicine, in the idea that our profession will only survive if we transmit our knowledge, ethos, and values to the next generation. I enrolled in the MScCH with the intention of pursuing this goal in a scholarly and systematic way. While teaching “on the fly” is doable, it is neither intrinsically rigorous nor reflective. Educational theory is not a strong interest of mine, but I recognize its importance in exploring and developing educational strategies that actually work.

As I’ve moved forward in the MScCH program, I would argue that my personal teaching philosophy is strongly rooted in integration theory. Nicki Woods explained in the very first week of INTAPT how basic science can improve learning when we stop treating it as a pre-requisite for the ‘real work’ of everyday clinical practice and instead infuse it into our understanding of key clinical concepts. Studies have shown that students retain clinical knowledge longer and more effectively when they understand basic mechanisms.1,2 I believe the cerebral learner is a better learner, and much of my quest as a lifelong student has been to always ask, and hopefully answer, the ‘why’ questions.

This curiosity for learning is mirrored in my results on the Teaching Perspectives Inventory, where I scored highest on the Transmission domain, which emphasizes “content mastery” and underscores the importance of “clarifying misunderstandings.3 This should not imply that I want to bog down my students (or myself!) with useless biological facts. I realize we are adult learners, and as Knowles argues, we want our learning to be problem-based and applicable to real-world scenarios.4,5 In these objectives I find no contradiction, however. I believe that a thoughtful learner cares about the ‘why’ as much as the ‘how’ insofar as the former can increase her facility in executing the latter. If, for example, we can understand the functions of different brain regions, perhaps we can more effectively diagnose stroke syndromes than if we were to rely on memorizing a massive number of syndromic patterns. In hospital medicine, this ability to reason critically is imperative to handling more complex or atypical disease presentations. My hope is that learners leave my rotation with a biology-based approach to internal medicine problems that facilitates a deeper and more enduring understanding of illness.

In my practicum, I have sought to test the theory that learners are better served by instructors who emphasize the value of critical thinking over simple memorization. Many of my teaching sessions have involved careful integration of basic science into a clinical topic; for example, I developed multiple approaches to common diagnoses such as hyperkalemia or anemia that are rooted in physiology-based classification schemes. Many of these have been transformed into pre-fabricated talks that I have archived in Microsoft OneNote that I intend to revise and reuse based on learner feedback. I also sought feedback from my learners both informally and formally with respect to whether these talks were helpful. One of these sessions was recorded with a formal and objective peer evaluation. I will also be comparing formal evaluations for my ‘earlier vs later’ talks to determine whether increasing use of integration is resulting in better effectiveness scores.

In closing, I hope this spirit of curiosity and dedication to improving how we teach permeate the collection of teaching activities and reflections you will find in this portfolio. I look forward to your thoughts and welcome your comments.

References: 

  1. Kulasegaram KM, Martimianakis MA, Mylopoulos M, Whitehead CR, Woods NN. Cognition before curriculum: Rethinking the integration of basic science and clinical learning. Academic Medicine. 2013;88(10):1578-1585.
  2. Baghdady MT, Pharoah MJ, Regehr G, Lam EWN, Woods NN. The role of basic sciences in diagnostic oral radiology. J Dent Educ. 2009;73(10):1187-1193.
  3. Pratt, D & Collins JB. A Short Questionnaire to Help you Summarize Your Views and Perceptions about Teaching. http://www.teachingperspectives.com/html/tpi_splash.htm. Accessed 3 March 2017.
  4. Knowles MS. Introduction: The art and science of helping adults learn. In: Knowles MS, et al, eds. Andragogy in action: Applying modern principles of adult learning. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass; 1984:1-20.
  5. Merriam SB. The new update on adult learning theory. New York: John Wiley & Sons Inc.; 2001.