“Medical education does not exist to provide students with a way of making a living, but to ensure the health of the community.”
Rudolph Virchow
This statement embodied the philosophy of the medical training I received as part of a brand-new medical school that was established to serve the underserved communities of Miami-Dade County.
During my first year of medical school in 2009, problem-based learning was still not widespread. Theories of adult learning were just starting to become widely accepted in medical education. I continued to learn more about adult learning and development theories in my master’s program, and these continue to inform my teaching.
My master’s also helped me to see that everything is teachable, from articulating the hidden curriculum within medicine to pathophysiology. The ability to teach everything comes from building scaffolding for critical thinking and exploring the learner’s zone of proximal development.
As I have continued to explore mechanisms of workplace learning, specifically entrustability, I have found that we cannot understate the importance of trust in the clinical setting. My research explores how trust is related to competence and how our learners experience earning trust. I believe it is likely the most important social judgment of graduate medical education.
References
Berger, J. G. (2011). Changing on the job: Developing leaders for a complex world. Stanford University Press.
Wass, R., Harland, T., & Mercer, A. (2011). Scaffolding critical thinking in the zone of proximal development. Higher Education Research & Development, 30(3), 317-328.
Harland, T. (2003). Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development and problem-based learning: Linking a theoretical concept with practice through action research. Teaching in higher education, 8(2), 263-272.
ten Cate, O. (2005). Entrustability of professional activities and competency-bases training. Medical education, 39, 1176-1177.
ten Cate O. Trust, competence, and the supervisor’s role in postgraduate training. BMJ. 2006;333(7571):748-751.
Anisha Kshetrapal, MD, MSEd 