Educational innovation and research forum

-

A few months ago I was invited to give a short presentation to inspire medical educators to involved in educational innovation and research. They were from different departments and levels of experience as educators.

I started talking to them about a beautiful garden, like the one in this picture:



Everyone would love to spend time there, now that it looks this way. But I wonder if we would all happily pay the price of doing gardening work, working early morning to prepare the land or be willing to sacrifice precious time in doing so.



It is exactly the same on research. There will be lots of time, sometimes even years before our publications can see the light of day.

Then why would we do it?
-          Well it is complicated just to try just to apply what we see already published in the international literature, and make it work in our settings. There are substantial differences in our settings.
-          The student’s training should not be based on what is used to, or what we have done traditionally, it should be based on evidence regarding the methods, strategies, procedures, and techniques, as well as the values and needs in health.
-          But especially, because there is a very big group of medical educators in the schools of medicine that have the skills to generate research and manuscripts that are relevant for medical education.

Education is not a discipline like chemistry or math. It is a field of a study that has phenomena, events, institutions, problems, needs, people and processes. Therefore, the approaches that we must use are different.

In this forum, I had the opportunity to work with highly committed educators that I am sure are, every day, working towards a better quality of education, to improve patient outcomes.

Here is a picture of the lovely crowd:




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

FAIMER family

-
Image
Last year I had the amazing opportunity to start a FAIMER fellowship in the beautiful city of Santiago, Chile. I started this program with a proposal to develop a VR setting to contribute to a patient safety culture. For me, it was a personal journey, as I got involved in this theme because my family and I experienced it in first hand when my mom had surgery. This project, allowed me to get to know the FAIMER family. This program was developed to improve world health through education, through a powerful community of very committed people.   These family, that I did not know that I had, were willing to provide feedback, learn together, and sometimes even being a shoulder to cry on. In this learning community, I have met the kindest people I have ever known, but most importantly, we are dreaming together about how to make the world a better place. I wouldn’t dare to say we have everything figured out, but we are doing something. I want to share a picture with you of last A
Read more

Is Faculty Development for me?

-
Traditionally, these professors in medical schools have had a solid preparation in their discipline and seek to transmit this knowledge and experience to their students. It is often expected that these physicians, without previous training in educational practice, offer quality teaching as a complement to the provision of services (Konerman, Alpert and Shashank, 2016); however, medical educators need to pursue formal training in education. It could be a workshop on your own institution, a fellowship or even a master’s program. However, considering that medical education is a field, and not a discipline, the faculty profiles that one can find in the teaching centers are wide. Most of the faculty development programs are generic to try to accommodate as much as the professional profiles they received, I would definitely recommend any developers and CPD leaders to tailor the programs to the specific needs of their context. Last year, we had an amazing opportunity to work with the AMEE
Read more

Professional culture

-
Image
You would not believe me, but I am writing this piece at more than 10,000 feet high. I am on my way to the Latin American Conference of Residency Education (LACRE) in Santiago, Chile. I will be presenting one of the previous studies that we ran for my doctoral project. I will be discussing the topic of how professional culture influences professional identity on medical educators. Professional identity refers to how they see themselves, and life itself. Members of a profession share knowledge, values and attitudes. Professional culture, as described by Hargreaves & Fullan (1991), could be categorized into individualized, balkanized, per project collaboration, and extended collaboration. -           Individualized: refers to a medical educator focused on the service provided to the students. Every professor in the educational setting would be focusing on his own subject, and not about the curriculum as a whole. -           Balkanized: refers to a collaboration between
Read more