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Tomorrow’s doctors will need deep medical knowledge and expert clinical skills, but in order to thrive they will also need a shared set of values.
That was the word from Richard Schwartzstein, the Ellen and Melvin Gordon Professor of Medical Education and director of The Academy at Harvard Medical School, as he spoke to a standing-room-only audience at the introductory session for the HMS Academy’s 2016 Medical Education Day.
This year’s event focused on helping educators from across HMS find the best ways to guide students through the new HMS Pathways curriculum.
When entering medical students arrive at the School, their teachers have a goal, Schwartzstein said.
“We want caring, compassionate, scientifically based physicians who can do it all,” Schwartzstein said. “How do we get from here to there?”
In addition to helping students become lifelong learners, he said, the faculty is hoping to nurture graduates who combine compassion and curiosity, collaboration and leadership, innovation and a strong sense of social responsibility.
Schwartzstein said those values are cultivated in the right educational setting.
“There's no two-year-old who isn't curious, but our education system tends to beat it out of you,” Schwartzstein said. “We can take what's there and enhance or destroy it.”
One of the key places those skills and values develop is in the learning communities that form the heart of the HMS experience, he said, including formal learning communities like the School’s academic societies and the myriad team-based learning groups that are integral to the recently revised Pathways curriculum.
Learning communities are designed to shift education from a lecture-based system, where teachers transfer information to students, to a student-centered system where learners engage with one another to solve problems together and acquire the skills needed to continue to learn by themselves.
The HMS academic societies, founded in the 1970s and 1980s, were among the first learning communities at a medical school. In recent years, many more medical schools have begun to launch their own learning communities.
Keynote speaker Robert Shochet, associate professor of medicine and director of the Colleges Advisory Program and of the Clinical Foundations of Medicine course at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, talked about innovations and lessons learned since 2005, when Hopkins rolled out its own learning community model.
The basic unit of the Hopkins learning communities is the molecule, he said, a group of five students and one instructor who work together closely throughout the first year and remain in contact as the students progress through the four years of medical school.
Shochet said that one key aspect of learning communities was the “cohesion and congruence between content and process.” Students sharpen their skills for a career as a physician that will be spent working in a team-based, collaborative, inquisitive learning process. They also experience what it means to be a member of a team that, through working together, discovers solutions to problems, overcomes academic and personal challenges and builds a foundation of values and professionalism.
The teamwork approach can also be very rewarding personally for educators, Shochet said.
“It's something very special to be involved in the development of another person," Shochet said.
