From left: Jane Neill, Jeffrey Flier, Edward Hundert and John Scully. Image: HMS/Bethany Versoy
From left: Jane Neill, Jeffrey Flier, Edward Hundert and John Scully. Image: HMS/Bethany Versoy
“We shape our curriculum, and afterwards our curriculum shapes us.”
Harvard Medical School's Dean for Medical Education Edward Hundert, riffing off Winston Churchill’s famous quote about how buildings shape their builders, zeroed in recently on how the new Pathways curriculum is actually reshaping learning spaces at HMS.
Hundert and a host of faculty, staff and students officially celebrated the opening of four new high-tech learning suites in the medical education center with a ribbon cutting ceremony on Oct. 8.
First and second year classes have been held in the new learning suites, located on the first and third floors of TMEC, since early August.
Hundert said HMS faculty were instrumental in contributing design ideas that would work with the new curriculum when they asked, “If we start with a blank piece of paper, what would a great medical education look like?”
“Ultimately, it is the students who are the beneficiaries of all this great effort."
The Pathways curriculum is built on a foundation of case-based, highly interactive and collaborative learning, and the new suites were specifically constructed with a flexible design to support and complement new teaching approaches.
“The new pedagogy for the Pathways curriculum requires a different configuration to facilitate teaching in groups of 40 to 45 students that could be subdivided into smaller teams of four, six or eight students,” said Jane Neill, associate dean for medical education planning and administration in the Program in Medical Education, who played a central role in getting the suites constructed in just two months’ time.
“It would have been very difficult to launch our Pathways curriculum this fall without these new suites, which allow our faculty to teach in all the ways they have envisioned over the past few years. We are changing the way we teach, and those changes require different kinds of learning spaces. Now, we have them,” said Jeffrey Flier, HMS dean.
Time Challenges
Faculty initially tried to teach the new curriculum within existing classroom layouts, Neill said, but they quickly determined that the old areas were not going to work for the more collaborative teaching strategies the curriculum demands.
The primary challenge was to gut existing classroom spaces and design four completely new suites that would include learning studios, labs and classrooms — and all within only two months.
Hundert and Neill credited engineering and construction project manager John Scully for much of the success pulling together multiple crews to finish the job on time.
Randy King, Harry C. McKenzie Professor of Cell Biology at HMS, who has already taught about 25 classes in the new spaces, said, “They are fantastic places to teach.”
“As a course director, I’m so glad that I don’t have to worry that the space works or that the technology works,” he said.
In addition to moveable, wheeled tables that can be arranged in a variety of formats—from private work stations to small group clusters to large group conference-style configurations—the new classrooms feature cutting-edge information technology tools and cameras, high-resolution touch and stylus-driven tablets and multiple screens.
Praneeth Machettira, director of technologies for education and online learning in IT-eComputing, said, “Easy-to-use spaces, easy-to-use technology, can really have a big impact on productivity.”
When HMS undertook planning for the renovations, he said, the key goals were to create a consistent user experience across the suites; ease of content sharing using a platform-agnostic system; and remote connectivity with other classrooms in the building, with any of the HMS-affiliated hospitals, or with faculty in the field anywhere around the globe.
“Space makes a difference about how we teach and how we feel about how we teach,” said Bernard Chang, associate professor of neurology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
He remarked on how the damp-lab spaces provide good lighting conditions for students to study brain specimens under the microscope and how bright, colorful, cheerful spaces create a highly conducive environment for teaching his neuroanatomy course.
Chang described what a pleasure it has been for the course instructors and guest lecturers, course directors and the students to use the learning suites.
“Students are smiling,” he said. “It’s refreshing and wonderful.”
“Ultimately, it is the students who are the beneficiaries of all this great effort,” said Hundert.
