Able and abounding

Anna and I got to know three batches of students well during our two years of stay at PIMS, Pondicherry. This picture is the reception area of the Aura, the inter-medical cultural, the students organised in 2012. It was planned and executed well that the we the, faculty were surprised by seeing some students who were indifferent in lecture and clinical sessions, showing extra-ordinary responsibility and abilities.

After the Aura, Anna and I had some final year students visiting us at home for a chat. The discussion drifted towards the way we teach students in the class room and at the bed side. They were most critical of reducing the class room lectures to power point presentations and the clinics to dry monotonous mini lectures. 

They helpfully defined for us some guidelines, to make the teaching-leaning process student friendly. Let me summarise them. 

Greet students and have a round of catching up with them to connect with them and invite them to be present. They admitted that most students, depending on who engages them, would plan a parallel agenda during the lecture, such as learning for the after noon test in another subject, texting a message, access the internet in the mobile, etc. But a friendly beginning often disarms them of their earlier plan.

Try covering the MUST know matters in the first twenty minutes and build around it clinical examples towards the latter part of the lecture, to reinforce and communicate interesting clinical applications. This promotes interest when attention normally declines half way through lecture.

Make time for some interaction- even if it is about politics, cricket, movie, hostel life, let it be. Students are keen to say something to the teachers. So create an opportunity to hear them. The give us a guided tour into their beliefs and attitudes.

The learning in the class room is minimal; but creating an interest in the subject and topic, is of paramount importance. A teacher who invokes this, naturally becomes a role model.   

The bed side clinics are to be fully devoted to demonstrations of clinical signs and introducing skills of communication and clinical observations. They detested the practice of taking clinics on imaginative clinical scenario, because a corresponding patient is not available for clinical demonstration. They squarely blamed this to the apathy of teachers.  

I have a suspicion that many teachers at Medical schools use outdated teaching-learnign practices. While attending a Medical Education seminar recently, I sensed that the even the latest the  Medical Council of India is proposing to 'modernise' the medical education would need further update as each batch of students is ahead of the previous batch in abilities. They are abounding in skills and enthusiasm.

Where are the teachers to match them! 

I wish, I had  known the above when we joined PIMS! 

M.C. Mathew