4. Best Practices in Teaching
Demonstrate reflective practice through the integration of evidence-based knowledge, skills, and attitudes towards establishing effective learning environments.
Artifact 4-A
Integration Paper
Reflection
For the Integration Paper in HPTT 801 – Foundations of Health Professions Education, I revisited the learning theory paper I had written earlier in the semester and accounted for where it diverged from the curriculum I had actually built. I selected it to represent competency 4a because it is the artifact where I audit my own design, which effectively demonstrates reflective practice.
My original paper was written for medical trainees who had completed medical school and for gastroenterology fellows rotating with the inpatient Hepatology team, where bedside examination and endoscopy make modeling and enactive learning straightforward. As the semester progressed, I pivoted to a fifteen-week curriculum aimed at medical students, which changed the content, the means of assessment, and the location of instruction.
The most important part of the paper discusses the need to adjust learning theory to match the change in curriculum while still maintaining elements of Bandura’s theory. Weekly open-book multiple-choice questions do not fit social cognitive theory well, and are better described by Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development and his sociocultural theory of language, since an open-book policy lets students scaffold using textbooks, online resources, or each other. I considered removing the open-book policy and using a locked browser, which would have aligned the assessment more closely with Bandura’s triadic reciprocal causation, but chose to retain open-book because it mirrors how certification examinations and real clinical lookup function. One of the challenges encountered was accepting that fidelity to real practice sometimes outranks theoretical tidiness. Following this course, I now have a better understanding of the importance of planning theory, activity, and assessment when building educational content rather than adapting after the fact.
Artifact 4-B
Applying Science of Learning Activity
Reflection
The purpose of this assignment in HPTT 802 – Instructional Design for Health Professions Education was to choose three of the twelve tips in Gooding, Mann and Armstrong’s paper on the science of learning in health professions education, find two published examples of each tip in practice, and briefly summarize each example. I selected it to represent competency 4a because it required me to find the evidence behind teaching practices I had been using.
My three tips came from three different themes. From applying learning to new and varied contexts, I took the tip on preparing learners to transfer knowledge to new settings, pairing it with a validation study for a colonoscopy simulation assessment tool and a study of virtual reality endoscopic skill in subjects with and without prior gaming console use. From harnessing the power of emotion, I took the tip on teaching learners to recognize their emotional state, pairing it with a qualitative study of Schwartz rounds and a literature review on the role of emotion in the transfer of clinical skills. From learning in social contexts, I took the tip on the social nature of learning, matched with a randomized trial of multimedia tweets and a comparison of altmetric scores and traditional published literature dissemination measures.
One of the challenges encountered was finding literature specific to hepatology. I had to think more broadly to consider my gastroenterology learners and to look at literature outside my primary specialty. The virtual reality skill study I found in the surgical endoscopy literature shaped the ergonomics proposal I built later in HPTT 824 – Simulated and Virtual Learning in Health Professions Education, where virtual reality develops foundational technique and augmented reality reinforces it in the live endoscopy suite.
Download the science of learning activity (PDF) (opens in a new tab)