Clinical Teaching Skills COE: Focusing on “how” instead of “what”

Harry Han, MD

Fellow in Hospice & Palliative Care Medicine 

Massachusetts General Hospital/Dana Farber Cancer Institute

PGY 4

03/09/2021

Harry Han, MD

The COE-CTS course was a great opportunity to hone in on “how” clinicians can improve their teaching skills. As a resident and fellow, I often am faced with multiple competing roles while teaching in the clinical sphere—team and time management, clinical decision-making, and learner education, often with the first two taking precedence. Even within the education sphere, my focus has commonly been on “what” needs to get taught without much thought placed in how I teach and what my learners take away from my teaching. Despite being put into an educator role, I was not taught “how” to teach.

The COE-CTS course provided me a deep dive crash course into “how” adult learners learn in the workplace, including discussions about adult learning theory (audience engagement, spaced learning, guided questions, cognitive load) and feedback. It made me realize that my often “on the fly” 2–5-minute teaching attempts or my attempts to cram too many learning points into these sessions may not necessarily be the most ideal for retention. Rather, being an effective educator relies more on being deliberate, prepared, and thoughtful about content. More importantly, the half day reinforced that a safe learning environment and relationships building with learners are critical for learning and feedback. Moving forward, I want to be more deliberate in cultivating and fostering my learning environment and relationships with my learners. I also want to be more deliberate about my teaching, being more succinct with my learning goals, and identify threads between topics to enable recall and repetition.

 Thank you for allowing me to participate in this course. It has become a launching pad for me to dive deeper in the education literature—after taking this course, I have many more questions to think about.