Day 2 Afternoon

Dr. Chris Smith (@ccsmith269) came back for his second talk on assessment of learning. He taught us that to be competent one must possess the required skills in all domains within a certain context at a defined stage of education or practice. He discussed the important issues of “competent vs. competence.” Dr. Smith added another pyramid to our repertoire of pyramids – Miller’s Pyramid (knows, knows how, shows how, does) and also talked about how to get the top of Miller’s Pyramid! (We are certainly seeing a theme here now in this course – how do we get our learners to top of pyramids! We warned you that there would be LOTS of triangles!) Dr. Smith shared with us that “assessment drives learning and learning is the key purpose of assessment.”

Dr. Schwartzstein then taught us about how to design and deliver more effective lectures – a big challenge these days! He started by telling us that we should call these LARGE GROUP INTERACTIVE SESSIONS! He provided some techniques to improve learner engagement. (There is that word engagement again! How many times has this been brought up throughout the course?!?!) The goals of a good lecture are to inspire learners, challenge them, and transmit information. Dr. Schwartzstein expanded upon the use of questions that you heard about from Dr. Hayes and Dr. Fishman. He told us we should wait 7 seconds after we ask a question. He also talked to us about humility and importance of modeling uncertainty. He told us that the large group setting is about modeling thinking and that it’s okay to not cover everything! “FREEDOM is another word for not having to ‘cover’ everything!”

We ended the day with a phenomenal talk by Dr. Kerri Palamara (@PalamaraMcgrath) on well-being and coaching. She taught us that general well-being is a state of being comfortable, happy, or healthy. She made the important point that burnout is an obstacle to well-being, but absence of burnout ¹ well-being. She also made the important point that well-being starts with leadership and as teachers we are leaders. Kerri stressed that we should lead with empathy! We had a great discussion about positive and negative behaviors and the importance of making changes at the system level. She talked about listening to understand and using the statement, “it’s sounds like…” she also taught us about creativity and curiosity.