The Haversian Canal

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May 25, 2006

On Lecturing, from a Student's Perspective

I've been writing about my thoughts on education from a student's perspective, and my thought for you is that the fundamental thing students need from teachers is through the levels of organization in the material, from the huge, grand thoughts, to the minute details, the schema. I came to this while considering what frame of mind a student should be in while studying outside of class. As I look back on my first year of medical education, it is fairly clear to me that some of our lecturers, though brilliant researchers and generally great people, were not good teachers, not because they didn't know the material, but because they did a terrible job of organizing their material and then putting their material in proper order. There are other ways to do a bad job of teaching, like interrupting natural trains of thought with 'clinical' pictures of terribly deformed children, or wasting the first ten minutes of lecture wrestling with the projector, but I want to focus on this large, conceptual, and it's-gotta-be-right-or-just-go-home issue of organization and sequencing.

Organization is somewhat at odds with sequencing. Time is a one-way arrow. Only one word can come out of one's mouth at a time. So how big a deal could organization be? Organization of a course is relatively straight forward: collect all the issues about the arm, break them up in reasonable bits, like, the superficial back, the shoulder, the brachial plexus, the arm, the forearm, the hand, et cetera, lecture for an hour on each of them, and then have a test. It's within a lecture where a lecturer's stock rises or falls. Most lecturers follow something along the lines of the classic "temple" model, where there's an introduction (the roof) three or four or five arguments or issues (the pillars), and a conclusion (the foundation, steps, whatever), and this is a good model. However, there is a challenge when the lecturer lecturer gets to those pillars and the logical organization no longer matches the sequential organization. This is where a lot of lecturers drop their students. Some get dropped as the lecturer dives into the first issue, but the real tragedy is when lecturers go to the second issue without transitioning. Another model for this is the GPG model - general - particular - general. You've got to come up out of the first particular and introduce the second, and when you're finished with the second, introduce the third. And the students need to know that you're doing this, because it's not obvious, particularly in the more abstract issues, like which cell types use which ion channels. If you talk about cell A using transporter A, then cell B using transporter A, then cell A using transporter C, where was the break? What exactly did you shift from and to? This is why I encourage profs to put as much information on one piece of paper as possible for each handout, so the students can anchor themselves in the lecture.

Ed (24 September 2006): There is a ready-made schema for the basic sciences years of medical education: First Aid for USMLE Step 1.

Posted by Niels Olson at May 25, 2006 4:34 PM

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Posted by: Wang Djorkinczon at May 28, 2006 4:51 PM

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