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To be a good educator, you first have to be a good leader. One of the most meaningful principles of leadership is to be an unselfish leader. We are all familiar with leaders who are consistently pushing their own agenda and trying to promote themselves for personal gain. This is not an ideal form of leadership. A leader should constantly work to promote their team. As an educator this means you should be teaching in order to ensure that your learners are becoming the best that they can be.
There are many ways to approach teaching and many learning theories exist to guide educators on how to best teach their learners. The cognitivist theory emphasizes the role of mental activities in the learning process that are also very important for practicing physicians:
Thinking
Remembering
Perceiving
Interpreting
Reasoning
Problem solving
As medical students and residents use these processes every day in medical decision making, they translate well to learning general principles. Cognitivism also emphasizes that individuals learn through active participation (Clark, 2018). In medical education, this includes the active participation in clinical care, but should also extend to didactic conferences. Active learners have a superior experience in classrooms and develop a deeper understanding of materials (Graffam, 2007). Previous projects of my own have included case-based learning, role-playing, and games to further engage residents in the materials. This has been shown to be beneficial in my residents-as-teacher curriculum as residents’ comfort with the teaching strategies taught increased post-curriculum (Burke, Schmitt, Jewell, and Schnapp, 2021).
In looking towards the future and based on feedback from previous works, I am hoping to continue to explore different avenues of active learning. I will continue to use ideas supported by Mayer’s cognitive theory on multimedia learning while creating curricula. This theory emphasizes that students learn more from pictures and words than words alone. It also includes discussions on how to avoid “cognitive overload,” and how to avoid this when creating multimedia content (Mazurik, Moore, Stobart-Gallagher, and Wicks, 2020). Within the realm of active learning, I am also hoping to further explore the ideas of gamification. Games are motivational and use reward schedules, instant feedback, dashboards, and meters to inspire learners through the path of the game (McCoy, Lewis, and Dalton, 2016). Through these principles, I plan to continue to make impactful curricula to serve my learners.
References:
Burke, S.M., Schmitt, T., Jewell, C., Schnapp, B.H. (2021). A novel virtual emergency
medicine residents-as-teachers (RAT) curriculum. Journal of Education and
Teaching in Emergency Medicine 6(3). DOI: https://doi.org/10.21980/J86S71
Clark, K.R. (2018). Learning theories: cognitivism. Radiologic Technology, 90(2),
176-179.
Graffam, B. (2007). Active learning in medical education: strategies for beginning
implementation. Medical Teacher, 29:1, 38-42,
DOI:10.1080/01421590601176398
McCoy, L., Lewis, J.H., Dalton, D. (2016). Gamification and multimedia for medical
education: a landscape review. Journal of the American Osteopathic Association,
116(1):22-34.
Mazurik, L., Moore, E., Stobart-Gallagher, M., Wicks, Q. (2020). Chapter 5: Cognitive
theory of multimedia learning. In D. Robinson, T.M. Chan, S. Krzyzaniak, M.
Gottlieb, B.H. Schnapp, J. Spector, D. Papanagnou (Eds.), Education theory
made practical (Vol. 3) (pp. 45-52). Academic Life in Emergency Medicine.
Image from Pixabay: https://pixabay.com/photos/brain-hand-grey-gray-brain-4961452/
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