If you have as much of a white cloud in CCT as I do.. you often wonder how to possible entertain all the medical students whom seem to flock towards CCT? In fact, I have had to often juggle three medical students, with literally 4 admitted CCT patients and nothing else to do. It is not an easy task, especially during this time of the year when they are auditioning for EM residency.
That’s when I reach into my bag and pull out my teaching file. Teaching file you ask? What is that? Luckily for all of us, we are no longer reliant upon physical EKGs, radiology images, or pure memory to come up with interesting EM cases and learning points to review with medical students. Its similar to a magician’s bag of tricks, entertainment for the whole family! I hope to review components of teaching files in this blog post and to inspire some ideas in those of you who may already have teaching files.
Teaching files can easily be electronic. This is great because we used to have to lug around folders of EKGs and radiology films. An important consideration is how to maximize the use of technology to optimize your own teaching files. For example, PACS allows us to save radiologic images in specially designated folders that make it easy to pull up interesting images. You can save by disease types, image types, or whatever else your imagination can come up with. You can play a guessing game of “find the abnormality” this way by flipping through the images. A lot of people also have iPads or other tablets that have apps that can be used to facilitate learning as well such as dropbox and blackboard. Some of these apps can allow you to draw on images such as circling the abnormality on EKGs. Some allow you to free type, so you can do interesting things like review the Kreb cycle!
One of my secrets of teaching is that I know a few things very well. I consider this as my mental teaching file. Therefore, I teach when those subjects come up. Or sometimes I twist my learning point to steer it towards the subject I know really well. For example, if we are discussing a case of significant bradycardia, I will subtly change the conversation towards ACLS guidelines of treating symptomatic bradycardia and the use of dopamine drips. All of a sudden I can have a dynamic conversation with the learner. This pushes you to know certain subjects well and creates great learning conversations.
Ultimately, to have a robust teaching file requires constant vigilance of tracking interesting cases, images, patients, and literature. It requires that you remember to take a photo of the interesting rash, and requires that you look up the latest EBM on the treatment of lyme disease induced third degree heart block. Finally, to become a great teacher, you will end up becoming a great clinician.
Good luck gathering the teaching material!
I would love to hear more thoughts on your own teaching file!
Nikita
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I think that this is an important point. It really helps your own learning to be able to teach it to someone else. Students are great ways of doing this and it works two ways because it is able to keep the students more involved. I have my own teaching file that I use that involve EM and IM resources. It has come in handy countless times when there is a lull with students, so I can do some teaching.
Thanks, Niki, great post, I like the “mental teaching files” concept… and yes, Michael, I totally agree– to teach is to learn twice!