Teaching context and philosophy
Broadly, my teaching philosophy is that I want students to take responsibility for their own learning, understand their own personal learning style and develop self-directed learning skills. My teaching thus emphasises a balance between developing knowledge and developing the ability to learn itself.
My teaching includes small group tutorials, biomedical practicals and clinical problem based learning (PBL) dry lab practicals. I believe in actively bringing learning content to life through delivering content in the most engaging fashion possible so that students can absorb the bulk of the content at the face-to-face session, with individual study afterwards spent absorbing finer details. As I detail below, this didactic style accompanies interactive and collaborative learning methods.
To promote self-directed learning and awareness of individual learning styles, I make different resources available for students to teach themselves major concepts, for example biostatistics. Students then need to answer questions related to the content using these resources. Students are thus forced to consider how different resources suit their learning styles best. I am also implementing flipped-classroom approaches whereby students go through some didactic content for tutorials at their own pace in their own time. In SGs I usually give a summary of learning content using my touch screen to draw diagrams and visual summaries, in a style similar to Khan academy. As I am speaking I usually ask the whole group questions to ensure they are listening and keeping up with content. I then run quizzes in a trivia-table style. This approach allows students to collaborate in small groups and reason together on what the correct answer is and allows me to assess how much of my summary they absorbed. Other learning tasks include applying the basic science I didactically deliver to solve clinical problems, again in collaborative small groups. I then go through the answers to quizzes or clinical scenarios with the whole group, noting student answers and actively challenging students as to how they arrived at those answers.
My teaching of wet lab biomedical practicals emphasises bench to bedside translation and the clinical relevance of the biomedical lab concepts students are learning. I encourage students to ask questions about protocols to understand their basis and see lab practicals as a means of also developing clinically relevant skills such as ability to follow a protocol, understand the basis of lab diagnostics and advances in biotechnology that will form the basis of future clinical therapies such as CRISPR and checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy and basics in understanding basic science medical literature. As educators and having been students ourselves we know that learning only occurs when students engage with the material in different ways. The hands-on wet lab practicals bring the basic sciences to life in a different way that textbooks and lectures simply cannot.
I would argue medical students need some grounding in basic science medical research, as most will do research at some point in their career. Phase I, a predominantly biomedical curriculum, is the right time to get this exposure. The wet lab practicals remaining in the curriculum is therefore appropriate.
There is also significant reason to believe that given the massive innovations in biotechnology in recent years wet lab knowledge and proficiency will form the basis of clinical care for doctors in the near future. For example the creation of RNA vaccines were the basis of the world recovering from the covid pandemic and RNA therapy is likely to become commonplace in the near future. There is also a significant need to augment the current wet lab practicals to incorporate advances.
My teaching philosophy is thus a blend of mastery-learning, personalised learning/learning styles and social constructivism. I practice mastery learning by delivering basic sciences didactically, then doing quizzes to ensure students have mastered content before allowing progression to higher-order tasks such as clinical problems. I also use social constructivism by promoting collaborative, small-group learning on learning tasks such as quizzes and clinical based problems. I also practice multiple intelligences and learning styles by providing different resources for students to go through and developing a variety of exam questions to address the different learning strengths of students. For example for in-class quizzes I developed ‘order’ questions for biological processes which required students to put the processes in the correct order, labelling questions (for more visual learners), MCQ questions, fill-in-the-blank and traditional extended response questions.
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