Joint Ventures: Physician Partners with Digital Media Center to Prepare the Next Generation of Practitioners
By Lauren Marsh
Joint complaints are the second most common reason people go to a primary care physician. Because there are several possible causes of joint pain, physicians must be able to skillfully examine joints and also to interpret the findings. Anne Minenko, assistant professor and clinician educator scholar in the Division of Rheumatic and Autoimmune Diseases, Medical School, has observed that many of her senior medical students don’t feel confident about their ability to perform a joint exam and notes that in a diagnostic workshop they “mechanically go about examining joints with little appreciation for the usefulness of every maneuver.”
Motivated by this challenge, Minenko decided to develop online resources that would help her students develop both competence and confidence. Her next step was to seek support from two programs offered by the Office of Information Technology’s (OIT) Digital Media Center (DMC)—the Digital Teaching Workshop and the Faculty Fellowship Program. The experience was not what she expected. Minenko thought she would gain some proficiency with teaching technologies, but didn’t foresee that her participation in the programs would transform her approach to teaching.
Before joining the Faculty Fellowship Program in fall 2007, Minenko, together with 17 other faculty, participated in the Digital Teaching Workshop in June. Designed for faculty and professional and administrative instructors who are new to teaching with technology, the week-long intensive workshop provides foundational skills and knowledge in integrating teaching and technology. The biggest surprise for her was that the workshop, grounded in the scholarship of teaching and learning, encourages instructors to shift from a content-oriented approach to course development in favor of a learner-centered approach. The workshop introduced her to backward design, a process through which instructors begin by imagining where they would like their students to end, in this case as medical professionals. The instructor then works backwards to design an instructional environment that guides students toward the desired learning goals. Minenko credits the workshop with giving her a better appreciation for the learning needs of her young students.
What Dr. Minenko learned from the Digital Teaching Workshop developed and deepened during the year that she participated in the DMC Faculty Fellowship Program. While the workshop provides a foundation, the faculty fellowship program offers a “capstone” experience. Throughout the academic year, five faculty from different academic disciplines met in a seminar environment to experience and explore teaching with technology. Fellows provide feedback to and support one another while they design and implement a technology-rich learning environment. Minenko found it “refreshing and humbling to realize that other educators have the same learning needs as you do.” She adds, “There were so many ‘aha!’ moments. Working with other faculty from a diversity of disciplines helped encourage [these insights] beyond what a group of solely medical educators could have provided.” Moreover, the principles and methods that structure the program transformed her understanding of teaching from a model of transmission of information to one of engaging students in a complex set of values and practices that culminate in patient care characterized by quality and safety. The program motivated her to think hard about the gap between her own expertise and her students’ inexperience and pushed her to break down and examine in detail the tacit knowledge that informs her own practice. She began to develop a series of modules that would allow students to gain knowledge and insight as well as to practice and review frequently. The modules emphasize the importance of each step of the joint examination and point out the consequences of poor technique while they provide students with opportunities to reflect on the importance of the procedures they have learned.
Dr. Minenko previously was in a private practice, but a strong desire to more meaningfully contribute to patient care through the education of future physicians motivated her to join the Medical School in 2000. In other words, “I came here to share my knowledge with the next generation of practitioners.” Minenko believes that a crucial component of promoting learning is giving faculty opportunities to develop familiarity with the growing body of literature about how people learn and to improve their skills with an ever-expanding repertoire of teaching tools. She feels the support and guidance that she received over the year was personally transformative and has helped her to grow as a teacher and a mentor. But more importantly, she hopes that “we’ve changed the lives of students forever.”
