Rethinking Medical Education

The ThinkerQuestions, observations, and recommendations toward reform of the process and content
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Why are you starting this new blog now? - Part 1  

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Why are you starting this blog now? - Part 1
My short answer: Several professional and personal factors coalesce to make this an appealing time for me to be creating and maintaining this blog. The main recent developments are:
  • The improving quality and expanding range of educational research.
  • New neuroscience research techniques are providing fresh insights into how our brains learn.
  • The arrival of "Web 2.0" (see below).
  • Some medical education programs are taking steps toward recognizing and rewarding deserving educators.
  • Colleagues and friends have encouraged me to have a regular outlet for sharing my reflections and ideas.
  • My current career stage provides me with some of the considerable time needed for this project.
My fuller answer, in 2 parts:


PART 1
There are encouraging developments 
A glimpse at the list of journals and other sources of information about medical education, many of which are available in the links in two sidebar widgets on the left of this screen (Related Journals/Info and Related Organizations), confirms that many encouraging developments are underway. There are growing numbers of people doing educational research in the health professions, and there is an impressive number of organizations focused partly or largely on efforts to enhance educational quality in our medical schools. Also, there are growing numbers of meetings and conferences focused on education in medicine and the other health professions.
But, we have a paradox of progress with limited meaningful change








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Why are you starting this new blog now? - Part 2  

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Why are you starting this blog now? - Part 2

Have you seen Part 1 of my answer to this question? If not, you can go to it here.

PART 2
Partly, I'm starting this blog out of my impatience with the slowness of the progress I've witnessed

Resistance to change 
Throughout the 55+ years in which I've been a close observer of medical education I've seen the availability of information on ways to improve medical education move forward at a far faster rate than changes in the educational process itself. Although educational research has become increasingly sophisticated and more widely undertaken, resistance to revising established practices in medical education remains strong in many quarters. Those who try to initiate constructive changes are too often ignored and marginalized. Resistance to constructive change has many sources and takes many forms. Much is passive, not active, deriving more from indifference and ignorance than from overt rejection. Many teachers choose, or are forced by lack of awareness of alternatives, to rely on patterns similar to those they experienced as learners. As I've tried to point out elsewhere, we are doing far better with our "macro" decision-making (our organizational planning) than with our "micro" decision-making (decisions that are needed during moment-to-moment, teacher-to-learner transactions). Our overall planning strategies have evolved fairly steadily, but our day-to-day encounters between teachers and students remain largely in the hands of people who are not sufficiently prepared for the demands of the tasks we depend on them to pursue. Too much front-line teaching has not changed significantly from a half-century ago. 

Why does change come so slowly? 



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Rethinking Medical Education by Hilliard Jason, MD, EdD is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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