This is how I teach
This month we spoke with Dr Matthew Arnold, lecturer and graduate of the Adelaide Medical School. Matthew has multiple roles within the school, coordinating the first-year courses of the new Bachelor of Medical Studies/Doctor of Medicine program, leading the development of the Scenario-Based Learning (SBL) curriculum, and coordinating a Year 6 elective rotation in Medical Education.
Here he speaks about how he strives to make his teaching authentic and contemporary to ensure high levels of student engagement.
How would you describe your approach to teaching/your teaching philosophy?
As a clinician, I practiced evidence-based medicine to strive to achieve the best outcomes for patients. Since transitioning to an academic career, I have carried forward a similar philosophy, seeking to practice ‘evidence-based medical education’ to ensure the best outcomes for students. My teaching philosophy is focused on providing authentic, learner-centric teaching opportunities, based on pedagogic principles that suit the needs of the students I teach. At the level of the broader curriculum, I apply principles of constructive alignment to ensure students understand the learning objectives of a given course of study, and that they can see that this is reflected in the teaching activities provided, and the assessments that they will undertake.
In the teaching environment, the methodologies I employ position the learner at the heart of the educational process, utilising a flipped classroom approach to enable students to focus on the higher order cognitive processes of application and analysis during workshop sessions.Matthew Arnold
What do you like most about teaching in your discipline?
It is genuine pleasure and privilege to be involved in educating medical students. One of the aspects I enjoy the most is the opportunity to have students practice integrating a wide range of knowledge and skills across the broad domains relevant to medicine and think about how they will apply these in their careers. Medicine includes so much fascinating science that is essential for understanding how the human body functions in both health and disease, but equally important is integrating this knowledge with the clinical skills required to perform a physical examination, or the complex communication skills required to lead conversations founded on principles of shared-decision making with a patient. It is so rewarding to be involved in helping students bring this all together, and seeing the moment where concepts all ‘click into place’, with students able to contextualise these learnings in relation to their future roles as doctors.
How does your teaching help prepare students for their future?
The majority of my teaching is delivered through Scenario Based Learning (SBL) workshops. These scenarios are created in conjunction with industry Clinicians to ensure that they are authentic, contemporary and directly relevant to students’ future practice. In these sessions, students work in small groups to progress through an authentic scenario, solving clinical problems as they do so. They move through the scenario, starting with a ‘one liner’ describing how the patient presents to a health service, before progressively revealing further information about clinical symptoms and physical examination findings, followed by investigations and management. At all stages, students are developing hypotheses for what might be going on, and postulating what additional information they will need in order to help the patient. This methodology is specifically designed to mirror their future experiences, both as more senior students learning on clinical placements, but also as doctors practicing medicine. This ensures that not only do they have the knowledge required to thrive in their future careers, but that they have developed the skills for learning and thinking within the clinical context that they will one day operate in.
What is your favourite way to use technology to enhance learning?
The great benefit of technology is its capacity to enable active learning, allowing students to engage more dynamically in teaching opportunities. Part of my teaching role involves delivering lectures aimed at building students’ skills in clinical and diagnostic reasoning. Using Padlet boards in these sessions allow me to frequently create opportunities for engagement, in which I will present clinical stems to students, and ask them what diagnoses they are thinking of, or what history questions would help them to differentiate between these, with students posting answers anonymously. This not only ensures an active learning experience, but also allows for me to find areas where there may be misconceptions, and provide additional explanations in real time to students. Beyond this, technology is a great way to bring fun into the classroom! I utilise the online quizzing platform Kahoot to run a short quiz at the end of each SBL case, with students answering questions in the small groups that they are in for the sessions. This provides a valuable knowledge check opportunity for students to practice answering multiple choice style questions, with the element of gamification further supporting student’s engagement and enjoyment of this aspect of the lesson.
You can hear more about Matthew’s Scenario Based Learning approach in the Marketplace of Ideas at the Festival of Learning and Teaching on Tuesday 31 October.