Day 1 Afternoon

Dr. Chris Smith (@ccsmith269) 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! 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. Schwartzstein (#hesnotontwitter) taught us about critical thinking and clinical reasoning. 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).

One big take home point is to change “differential diagnoses” to “hypotheses” – what do you think? Will you give it a try? We challenge you to try it – in your notes, on your ward team, however you want!!

For links to some papers on critical thinking from Dr. Schwartzstein and Dr. Hayes check out our twitter feed - @BIDMC_Education #HMSMedEd23

Dr. Quinn Capers (@DrQuinnCapers4) from UT Southwestern ended our first day with a powerful talk on Implicit Bias in Medicine and Healthcare. He taught us that we all have implicit biases – it’s how the brain works and these “set the table” for discrimination. Implicit biases CAN BE overridden though. Awareness is the first step! Dr. Capers shared these 4 strategies to reduce/neutralize implicit bias: 1) Common identity formation 2) Perspective taking 3) “Consider the opposite” 4) Counter-stereotypical exemplars. To read more from Dr. Capers check out this from ATS Scholar – a must read for all especially for those who are in the midst of or preparing for interviewi:

https://www.atsjournals.org/doi/full/10.34197/ats-scholar.2020-0024PS