February 3, 2023

Acquiring New Teaching Skills – October 2022

When I started working at Duke in 2005, I was confident that I knew how to teach effectively having spent the early part of my career teaching medical students and residents at Strong Memorial Hospital in Rochester, NY. During my first year here in Durham, I enrolled in a series of teaching seminars led by my esteemed colleague, Dr. Larry Greenblatt.  Within a short period of time, during which my teaching was filmed and analyzed, I realized that I still had a whole lot to learn about how to teach effectively.  I focused on making myself change my approach to learners, and I worked on incorporating a different style of teaching into my daily workflow. I recall that this was an uncomfortable time, and I am sure I provided plenty of negative remarks to my colleague- but I eventually landed upon a teaching method that has allowed me to comfortably see patients while having learners work with me for each of my clinic sessions throughout the week.

 

As most of you know, we are hosting another faculty development teaching seminar this fall on Friday morning November 4.  I am excited that we going to host this as an in-person event, and we will be meeting at the Duke Integrative Medicine site on Erwin road.  The event is being sponsored by Duke Primary Care and there will be no charge for enrollment.  Upon completion of the event, CME credit will be awarded.

 

We have a number of well-respected colleagues who will be leading discussions on the 4th.  Fatima Syed will be talking about challenging students and how to identify them and how to communicate with course leadership about your observations.  Karl Bernat is going to speak about the juggling act of seeing patients and teaching while (mostly) staying on time.  Nancy Weigle will come to answer questions about her expectations when the 90 different medical students come to rotate in our clinics during their family medicine rotations.  Poonam Sharma will come to introduce the new Pioneer curriculum that is being rolled out for the medical school in August 2023.

 

As Dr. Shah has mentioned, during this time of desired fiscal conservatism, it is hoped that we all can minimize our costs for meeting CME requirements this year, preferably without outside travel.  Spending a half day amongst like-minded colleagues at Integrative Medicine should be an easy way to earn some CME hours.  We also know that gathering with colleagues to share tricks and best practices is a gratifying way to energize our interest and skill set in clinical teaching.

 

I urge you to sign up for the seminar.  You do need to plan ahead and get your clinic schedule frozen so that you are actually free on Friday morning.  Here is the link, and I hope to see many of you at the seminar soon.