A few years ago, I was approached by a senior colleague to do a bit of community service work speaking to potential medical students. I am a faculty member in a family medicine teaching unit, and so I thought it would not only be a nice thing to do but also be a way to do a bit of public relations work for our office.
The audience was a premed club at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan. I was given a fairly broad topic: “The State of Medicine Today.” Yikes! I had just read through the National Physician Survey and thought the information might be useful for those with visions of stethoscopes and lab coats dancing through their heads.
I went out on that cold February evening and put on my show. After I wrapped up, the club president gave me a plaque and thanked me for the “edutaining” presentation. “Pardon me? Edutaining?” I said to the fresh-faced young man.
“Yes,” he said. “It was funny and engaging and I learned something from it.”
This undergraduate student had just summarized in one word the description that has eluded me for years. I always wondered about the mysterious element that made certain educational experiences memorable and others only too forgettable. That was it! Edutainment.
As terrible and ungrateful as this might seem, I found the undergraduate medical training experience the worst of my many years of postsecondary education. The large class sizes, the dark theatres, the monotonous speakers, and the relentless click, click, click of the old-fashioned slide projector all worked together to deaden my previous enthusiasm for learning. As I progressed through medical school, my cynicism increased exponentially as the specialist-based, didactic teaching continued. I became very critical of those professors who, as I saw it, could not hold my interest. The only bright light in those days was the one-on-one interaction with patients. My internship, even with its long hours and steep learning curve, was a breath of fresh air after the tedious classroom experience.
In the audience
Last year I decided to take a research class. It was an attendance-optional, assignment-mandatory course, which provided different learning opportunities for all involved. Surprisingly, it was such a relief to sit in a classroom as a student again. The material was relatively light and most of it was familiar to me, leaving me free to observe some of the other students as I listened. Imagine my surprise when I heard the muttered complaints about the presenter and the quality of course content. At first I was angry with the lack of respect the students were showing. Then I was irritated by their seemingly selfish attitude—they were treating the course as an inconvenience rather than a privilege.
After my gut reaction had passed, however, a sense of familiarity dawned upon me. Isn’t this the way I had behaved only a few years earlier? The hypercritical, cynical evaluation of the educational experience by the current residents was not foreign to me. This was not a pleasant realization.
So, what’s my point? I suppose one gets a tiny bit spoiled in terms of educational expectations when one has had the privilege of some pretty fabulous experiences. Also, from the perspective of the learner, it can be difficult to sit through a perceivably boring or poorly prepared lecture. Was the disgruntled resident response reasonable? In light of current theories on knowledge translation, how much lecture-based teaching should there even be in today’s medical schools?1
From the stage
As an educator, this experience made me wonder about the effects my teaching might have on students—if any! I reread any student evaluations that I had on hand and really concentrated on the ones that had critical content. I also tried to solicit honest feedback from some of my residents and medical students after one-on-one clinical instruction. This reflective process forced me to acknowledge that my own teaching efforts could use some work. I also found that it wasn’t necessarily a matter of entertaining the students, per se, but more about making the teaching sessions meaningful. It really helped to imagine how I myself would like to be taught the material in question and go from there.
Some of the practical suggestions that I have to improve teaching methods, for anyone who considers themselves a medical educator, are fairly simple. First, check out your medical school’s faculty development department. Here you will find a variety of courses for educators on topics like clinical teaching, classroom lecture techniques, using educational games, and small group facilitation. You can also participate in many great Web-based courses and forums from the comfort of your own home, using your medical school’s community-based faculty page as a starting point. Or, ask your students or the technophile in the office about the latest gadgets or websites being used in everyday practice and take some time to play with some of the applications.
After all this contemplation, it strikes me that ultimately the responsibility for a quality education falls on one’s own shoulders. It is unrealistic to blame a teacher, or a learner for that matter, for a negative educational experience. Even pure entertainment requires an engaged performer and audience. Similarly, if there is something you want to learn and especially if there is something you want to teach, you have to be willing to make an effort yourself.
That’s edutainment folks!
Footnotes
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Competing interests
None declared
- Copyright© the College of Family Physicians of Canada
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