Interpersonal Communications CEO 4.6 Effectively prepare and deliver educational materials to individuals and groups.
My mother and father are both educators. They instilled in me a dedication to teaching according to best practices. I remember, as a child, helping my mother put together overhead transparencies for those cumbersome projectors. Teaching isn’t just throwing information at an audience and hoping it sticks. From an early age, I learned and have been applying the basic principles for retaining information, acquiring concepts, and developing skills. From my personal experience, I know that, depending on the nature of the content, such as information, concepts, or skills, I can select and use different strategies for studying. Learning about infectious diseases is at a knowledge level that requires rote memorization, for which one can use mnemonic devices. So I made use of SketchyMicro, a program that presents visual mnemonics to help remember information about infectious disease. As a visual learner, it worked well with my learning style.
Visual learning is a powerful style that should always be present. When I give presentations, in addition to a verbal explanation of the topic, I carefully include illustrations, graphs, and models, even if I have to make my own. To a visual learner, a picture is worth a thousand words. Including verbal, visual, and kinesthetic components into a talk allows it to reach more audience members. When teaching skills, such as in an ultrasound workshop, I know the critical attributes of the skill. So I explicate the steps and demonstrate the skills while verbally labeling what I do and also labeling the images on the ultrasound machine with text. Then, I discuss and give examples as to when and how the skill can be used.
Before medical school as an undergraduate engineer, I was a math tutor in undergrad, working for the math department at Ohio State. I derived great joy from making simple paper models to demonstrate to students how to conceptualize volume. The best feeling was when I knew that my students really understood the material and that they’d be able to succeed not only on their homework but when problems built on the same concepts appeared on their exams. During my masters’ degree, I was a teaching assistant, and I loved walking students through the lab equipment and helping them reach their own conclusions. These experiences helped prepare me for the Lead, Serve, Inspire Curriculum of The Ohio State University.
One aspect of service is teaching and thereby giving back to the community by preparing the next generation of clinicians. In my time at medical school, I have made various educational materials for various purposes and will describe a few of them here.
During longitudinal practice in my first and second years, I asked my preceptor, a surgical oncologist, if she had any need for illustrations. I had a personal goal to illustrate a paper. As it turned out, there was a review paper she had been thinking about writing. As she was quite busy, I was able to not only draft the illustrations but also the manuscript itself, which we are revising again for submission. Figure 1 shows the illustrations I made for our review paper, which provide a compact resource for those looking to learn more about minimally invasive inguinal lymphadenectomy.
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Figure 1: Minimally invasive inguinal lymph node excision.
I also entered my artwork in the College of Medicine Art Show and was awarded an Honorable Mention (Figure 2) and the Dean’s Collection Award. My art, along with other artwork, was displayed in the Dean’s Conference Room for a year. Perhaps those who visit the Dean will see it and be inspired to learn more about inguinal lymphadenectomy.
Figure 2: Honorable Mention in College of Medicine Art Show.
In my third year, I wanted to delve more deeply into otolaryngology research. After some searching, I found an attending who had a project for me. She asked if I could illustrate an unusual arytenoid finding for one of the residents’ posters. The resident wanted a softer pencil design, but I also drafted a colored version (Figure 3), in case she needed one.
Figure 3: “Shar pei” larynx.
At my away rotation at Georgetown University, I was privileged to see a rare finding: a fracture of the stapes capitulum. Scouring the literature, I was only able to find a handful of other examples of fracture of the stapes capitulum. All the other example I could find had been traumatic fractures, for example, provoked by a twig thrust into the ear or motor vehicle accidents. My patient had merely been trying to clear his ears when his fracture occurred, a much less traumatic scenario. With my resident’s encouragement, I put together a talk on stapes fracture for Grand Rounds. As stapes fracture is a rare occurrence, I created a table that reviewed cases, treatments, and outcomes, as no such table existed in the literature. Thus, my audience could quickly see what had already been attempted. I also illustrated our particular case of stapes fracture (Figure 4) and received positive feedback from many of the audience. To think I drafted it in a few days in a rented room in a strange city, without my usual pens or scanner!
Figure 4: Stapes capitulum fracture.
Back at The Ohio State University, I have been so fortunate to be a member of the ultrasound curriculum since my first year, when the program was called Trinity. (It has since been renamed to Beginner Ultrasound.) As a Trained Simulated Ultrasound Patient (TSUP), I helped others learn about ultrasound and anatomy. I continued modelling and progressed through Intermediate and Advanced Ultrasound. In Advanced Ultrasound, I proctored for Ultrafest 2016, our regional ultrasound conference and competition. As a member of Honors Ultrasound, the next year, I wanted to do more. I volunteered as the Ultrafest Senior Curriculum Leader and worked with a group spanning from second year medical students to attendings to work on the ultrasound curriculum for Ultrafest. It was challenging and exciting to work together to decide what scans would be the most interesting and useful for medical students from all around the Midwest.
For my Honors Ultrasound project, I worked on the thyroid ultrasound curriculum for the second-year medical students. This year, the attending who usually worked on the thyroid ultrasound curriculum with the honors students was ill, needed to focus on health, and wasn’t available to assist. So I had to design and revise my own PowerPoint, as well as craft the four stations that the students would rotate through. Not surprisingly, my talk was visual – not too long, not too short, just right.
Although not required for students, the slots were filled in a matter of hours by eager 2nd year students. Word on the “street in Meiling” is that you can learn a lot from this hands-on course. I brainstormed with Dr. Bahner, the Director of Ultrasound, which activities would be the most useful, educational, and intriguing for the students. We kept a focus on straightforward but interesting activities. I cooked up a prototype phantom of thyroid nodules (raw chicken with hidden treats) and took it to an Honors Open Scanning Session to make sure that the phantom would work. When the actual time came, I was able to demonstrate suspicious echogenic features (Figure 5) to the second-year students without needing to actually procure a pathologic thyroid somehow.
Figure 5: Suspicious echogenic features.
At The Ohio State University, I have been blessed with many opportunities to draft educational materials, receive feedback on them from critical but caring faculty, and practice my teaching skills. Going forward as a resident, teaching will become an even larger part of my role. When I have to teach younger residents about tympanostomy tube insertion, I will remember how I learned to make a tympanic membrane simulator from small plastic tubes, rubber gloves, and a box. In the more distant future as an attending, I hope to practice at an academic hospital, where I will keep teaching and learning about new ways to achieve the best teaching outcomes.