teaching in practice – an educator by chance

very interesting blog post by @laikas a Dutch Clinical Librarian who blogs on her MedLibBlog - she describes how she became an educator by chance. Interesting reading.

teaching in practice – reflection on teaching session – recordings

Today in a 2.5hr teaching session with postgraduates, I was recorded. While the student did ask my permission, and I said yes, I don’t think I asked enough about this.

• what was the recording – just audio, or was there a camera too?
• what was going to happen to the recording?
  • would it be posted on the internet?
  • just for that student, or for sharing with the group?
• why was I being recorded?
  • was it a language issue?
  • was the student disabled in some way that I was unaware off?
• is there any university policy about “informal” recording of lectures?
• while I consented, there was quite a lot of discussion amongst the group during the session, which was undoubtedly recorded too – what about their consent?

So now I’m left wondering what to do.

I think I will contact the student who made the recording to ask about the purpose and nature of the recording, and where it’s going to end up. I might ask for a copy as well (though 2.5 hours of my own voice is likely to be too much to bear!).

But it also raises the question in my mind – whether I should be creating podcasts of certain aspects of my teaching sessions, so that I can ensure the quality of the recording is adequate,  and that the quality of the content is clear (I fear that my delivery of certain concepts to a faceless audience would be very different to my delivery when faced with a group whose body language I can try to read, and who can ask questions).

Teach in Practice – thinking point: teaching style & type of learner

Having previously stated that I think that the nature of what I teach requires more didactic and Socratic (at best) teaching methods I’m wondering what sort of teaching styles I actually incorporate into my sessions. There are 4 choices:

• Authority / coach (for those dependent learners)
• Motivator / guide (for interested learners)
• Facilitator (for involved learners)
• Consultant / delegator (for self-directed learners)

I have 2 sorts of training sessions happening at the moment –  about 10 classes for groups of 15 Part2 (ie 3^rd year) undergraduates, and 2 classes of c.15 MPhil students.

Ostensibly they cover the same thing (just with different levels of detail)

• Establish what the group already knows about literature searching
• Introduce the idea that there are other places to look than google
• Present a range of different tools and techniques which can be used to improve search results
• Hands-on searching of some databases to put techniques into practice.

The undergraduate version of this session is very much more motivator to begin with(inspiring, goal setting – ie you want your dissertation to be as good as possible don’t you? Do you think current startegies are adequate to the task?) and coach (informational lecture – ie these are the buttons you press to make pubmed do what you want) with a little bit of facilitator in there as well (discussion around the range of language in any one topic).  The group are very much in the dependent stage – I send out a pre-session questionnaire asking if they’ve used, heard of but never used, or never heard of Pubmed, web of knowledge and endnoteweb. They know that their skills are pretty much non-existent in relation to what I intend to cover in the session (although they are yet to be convinced perhaps that it matters – that hopefully comes in the session!). But I would hope that they’re also an interested learner – at least when I try to suggest why pubmed v google is no contest. So hopefully my teaching style is pretty close to the types of learners who attend.

In terms of teaching style, the postgraduates get pretty much the same mix of motivator and facilitator (particularly since they are definitely interested as learners – they know why the stuff I’m talking about is useful/valuable, and they know they’ve got an intense year ahead). And I do try to be more of a delegator as well – establishing what skills they already have, and what they might like to focus on in the session – they’ve already got a deal of experience in searching to get the information they need (a lot of the time gathered through self-directed learning ie they’ve taught themselves), it’s just perhaps a longer, more frustrating process than it needs to be. But it’s interesting how much I still return to being a coach when it becomes clear that their techniques have some holes in them.

There’s a couple of activities I do in the postgrad session which hopefully encourage more reflection on their part, and which also encourage me to let them dictate the pass and content of the session:

• After inviting the group to introduce themselves and their experience of searching, I ask them to plot themselves on a graph with x-axis = experience and y-axis = confidence. What I should do (but didn’t in todays session, was to close the circle at the end of the session, and ask the students to re-position their plot if they’d like to after the end of the session. This wouldn’t be intended to make them feel rubbish, but to encourage them to reflect on how much they could improve their technique with a better knowledge of what they could actually be doing.
• After presenting a very complex search strategy I ask the students to write on post-its the question the strategy is try to answer. We then deconstruct the strategy. To improve this task, I should pause half way through the deconstruction to ask if anyone would like to rephrase/edit the question they posted. And allow time for the group to consider the changes.
• Having established the experience of the various students attending, it would be better to ask them to raise one or 2 issues they struggle with, and then ensure I address these in the rest of the session – perhaps ticking them off to emphasise that I’ve addressed their specific questions.

critical appraisal session – reflection

for 2 x librarians, 4 x Dr, 1 x OT, 2 x lay members of ethics committees

Aims:

To provide participants with a structured basis for critically appraising quantitative research papers.

Objectives:

By the end of the session participants will be able to:

•Understand the principles of critical appraisal

•Know about the resources that will help you

•Critically appraise a piece of research as a group

Plan of the  1/2 day:

• • Start with introductions & expectations – a bit of history about me, and a clarification that I’m not a statistician and that if it takes a statistician to understand clinical research then I bet there’s more than just me in hot water!, also disclaimer that I’m not a clinician, so I might skip over some aspects of a paper that are terribly interesting to the group from a clinical view point, but that from the point of view of the paper are perhaps not that important.
  • Go round table asking about experience, and expectations for the day (mix of drs & OTs & lay ethics group members)
  • Start with a quiz – mind gym after lunch to get them refreshing/thinking about research methodology and terminology
  • Work through quiz, getting people to suggest reasons for correct answers, and to suggest reasons why an answer might be incorrect. For the OR (odds ratio) section, draw a blank forest plot and ask group to draw on diagram where the CIs would lie, and therefore why a result might be significant or not. Trying to encourage theose with stronger skills to explain to those with more rudimentary understanding – helps them refresh, and encourages idea that I don’t have all the answers, and that colleagues and books might help
  • Break
  • Actually do the critical appraisal of a paper using CASP RCT checklist – small enough group that we worked through it as a whole group, rather than dividing into groups. They were already well socialised, and were happy to speak up and raise areas where they were unsure or unclear. We spent quite a long time on the first 3-4 questions, and so had to rush a bit through the final questions, but did manage to squeeze in final round up
  • Info on the other sources of help – websites, books , practice!

Reflections – 2^nd half was very rushed – I perhaps spent too much time raising areas for them to consider. Perhaps the group hadn’t read the paper so very thoroughly in advance, and certainly one had only received it on the day (late applicant)

Good things

• quiz
  • raised lots of issues early on, and encouraged group to share and discuss reasons for correct answers with each other. Lay member raised issue that sometimes the quantitative slant of the questions wouldn’t be the most important sort of research to help/influence patients – the qualitative stuff was just as important (sometimes more so) when considering hierarchy of evidence.
  • Interactive and engaging but not confessional – nobody knew who answered what, so it allowed people to discuss without shame/ embarrassment

• Critical appraisal
  • Again, very group oriented – lots of discussion and explanation from the group,
  • Questions raised from lots of different perspectives
  • Point raised later that having a mix of “dispassionate” reviewers plus clinical reviewers helped to tease apart some issues, helped focus the mind on the paper as opposed to the clinical issues which might actually just be a difference of opinion
• Flipchart
  • Liked that I drew diagrams to give visual presentations of some of the stats, rather than relying on verbal explanation
  • Liked that members of the group drew too, and contributed.

Bad things/ areas for improvments

• time – very rushed at the end – I’d spend too long asking them to look in more depth at the population
• fairly stuffy room – glad I put in a break half way through, but it could have been a little shorter, which would have given more time
• should have perhaps done a little more introduction to some of the main themes/terminologies before the quiz to (could use a prezi??) to soften the blow for those for whom it really was almost the first introduction
• should have remembered the clickything to move the powerpoint on, which would have meant I could have moved around or been sitting more (less of a teacher?), rather than standing
• didn’t refer to the books or get any of the group to look up the “answer” in the books, though a couple of the doctors were interested in the books we’d brought along
• given that some of the group were very much more “begininer” than I’d realised, so it was pretty harsh to drop them in quite so hard – so need to get much better understanding of who’s coming along to be able to pitch it at the right level – bit it did make it an opportunity for the rest of the group to test/demonstrate their understanding of p-value/confidence intervals etc – if you have to explain what it means, then it can highlight just how well you understand the topic!

teaching in practice – thinking points: what’s my role, what are my learning needs?

• What is my role as a teacher?
• How can I identify my learning needs as a teacher?

these are the thinking points in the first section of the Clinical School Teaching in Practice module.

What is my role as a teacher?

my first observation is that I do teach and train on a regular basis, but rarely seeing the same cohort of students more than once.

The nature of library training sessions (and I’ll come to my thoughts about the difference between training teaching later I’m sure, though not in this post) is that people turn up when they need some help, I help them (hopefully), and they go away again. There’s little change to develop a relationship over time, see understanding develop and improve, assess learning. So it feels a little bit that as a teacher I’m fire fighting – not nurturing skills which will grow over time. My contribution to the improvement in skills is hard to measure, and whether in fact the skills have become embedded and learned in a fundamental way, rather than just a surface skimming way is difficult/imposible to judge.

I work and collaborate with a group of NHS librarians, and we’ve developed a pre- and post-training questionnaire which we try to use in order to get a base-line measure of skills/knowledge/competence, and then send out 6 weeks later to try to test whether the learning was skin deep, or a little more ingrained. We take this pragmatic approach because the healthcare professionals we see are time poor, and previous experience suggests that requiring a commitment to attend more than one session is unlikely. So, these evaluations are a start, but still not a substitute for seeing the same cohort of students come back time and again.

It would be good to see the clinical students repeatedly, and to have an assessment of their information seeking skills tested in a formal way – like the Leicester University Librarians have a medline searching stage built into the OSCEs.  I wonder if information skills will ever be valued in Cambridge in the same way?

What are my learning needs as a teacher?

Now this is tricky – I don’t know what I don’t know, and even if I did, would I be able to change the way I deliver my teaching?  hmm – that’s a tough one. Being a very activist learner myself, I find it hard to adapt when I’m with with people with other learning styles (description of Honey & Mumford Learning Styles here and here) So learning how to adapt my teaching would be one need.

Also, I think getting some ideas about how to test understanding in the session itself would help me – since I mostly seeing people in a one-off situation, if I don’t get it right then, there are no second chances. Yes, delayed testing demonstrates that a deeper learning has taken place, but I’ll take what I can get!

Perhaps I don’t know what I need? so getting some peer observations of my sessions would be great – nerve wracking, but great.

In terms of the style of teaching – I’m probably didactic (pass on knowledge) or socratic (facilitating learning through awareness and raising questions) at best, and very unlikely to be reaching the dizzy teaching heights of heuristic or counselling… ah well, know your limits, eh? Could I change/develop?  Given the nature of the skills that I teach could/should/need I change? Maybe the peer observation would help?

teaching in practice

yesterday I went to the first session in a course on teaching in practice for clinical education. It’s an HEA accredited course provided by the Clinical School to help tutors improve their teaching skills.

I’m the only non-medic taking part. (can you hear the intimidated wail??)

As well as introducing education/learning theory there’s the need to keep a reflective blog, the opportunity for peer review of a teaching session, and lots of encouragement to reflect and critique my practice. This can all lead to a HEA qualification – the first teaching qualification I’ve had the opportunity to get! Considering the amount of time that I spend teaching this is ridiculous, outrageous and wonderful in equal measure.

so brace yourselves – there will be lots more hummings and hawings over the next weeks and months.

But I’ve already had the opportunity to put some of the theory into practice.

This morning, I had a 2 hour session with 7 pre-registration pharmacists. Normally, this would have focused on literature searching in embase (using NHS ATHENS)  and a brief introduction to the medical library. I was told a couple of days beforehand that this group would be receiving some embase tuition from another source the day before my session – this prompted me to suggest that we could use the session for any discussion/clarification of searching, provide an introduction to local resources and support, and perhaps offer some “quiet time” for work on the audit that each pre-reg pharm. had to complete. This plan was agreed by the organiser of the group, and they duly turned up.

After intrducing myself, I started by acknowledging that they’d had a session on Embase and searching yesterday, so presented them with a range of choices about how they might like to spend the 2 hours:

• refreshing embase searching
• working on personal audit project
• introduction to local resources
• general information resources on the web

 Each member of the group said what they’d like to spend time on, we agreed a sequence of activity (intro to local resource, refresh embase, work on own project), and set off.

I started off with the introduction to local resources, and encouraged them to search on the library catalogue themselves as I demoed it.

When we moved on to the Embase section, I tried to establish just what they knew/remembered about searching – working through a search and asking them questions about what the difference between different approaches would mean (diff no. of hits for freetext vs MeSH), what the different buttons meant (explode vs major), asking to tell me how they’d limit a search. We clarified boolean logic (I drew on a flipchart, and they completed the venn diagram).

It gradually became clear that they’d been give instruction that they’d found confusing yesterday, and I think(!) I was able to resolve the confusion – illustrating how finding the MeSH term could be more streamlined. The group asked questions and discussed amongst themselves about the approach I was suggesting.

I found it awkward to feel that I was contradicting the instruction of a colleague (who I don’t know, but would appear to be quite senior), but my main concern was that the group were more confident with searching and were as well skilled as possible to get the information they needed.

The 2nd hour was spent on self-directed work on their own pr0ject, while I stayed on hand to address any questions or queries.

10mins before the end I reminded the group that beyond this session I’d be available to offer support if they wanted it.

shame that: there was no chance to assess their learning – I’d not used the pre- and post-training questionnaires that have been developed for use by NHS trainers in the East of England. Maybe next time.