Day 1 Afternoon

Dr. Chris Smith kicked off our first afternoon with an exciting talk on clinical teaching.   During his talk, he told us that patients, teachers, and learners, like clinical teaching, but there are a lot of barriers and challenges to teaching at the bedside. One of the biggest barriers is TIME! (Other barriers include patient privacy, faculty knowledge, micro and macro aggressions.)  One way to overcome the TIME challenge is to prepare! He also talked about the microskills of teaching (something every educator should know!):

Get a commitment

Probe for supporting evidence

Teach general rules

Reinforce what was right

Correct mistakes

Dr. Rich Schwartzstein then talked to us about defining, teaching, and assessing critical thinking. In the words of Albert Einstein: “Education is not the learning of facts but the training of the mind to think.”  We learned about recognizing cognitive biases and strategies to combat them. We also learned the importance of accepting uncertainty. It is our job to help learners THINK! We need to move away from memorization and focus on thinking skills. We need to push learners up Bloom’s taxonomy (first introduced by Dr. Hayes during her morning talk).

We ended day one with a powerful talk by Dr. Quinn Capers on Implicit Bias in Medicine and Healthcare. He taught us that we all have implicit biases, but we can mitigate these. Implicit biases CAN BE overridden. Awareness is the first step! Dr. Capers shared these strategies to reduce/neutralize implicit bias: 1) Common identity formation 2) Perspective taking 3) “Consider the opposite”