Educating the Educators

Announcer: Asking questions, seeking perspectives, searching for answers. Algorithms for Innovation presents, Impossible Problems in Academic Medicine.

Jones: I'm Dr. Kirtly Parker Jones and I'm a professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology. And I am also on the curriculum committee at the University of Utah, School of Medicine.

Interviewer: What is it that you see as an impossible problem or something that academic medicine needs to deal with right now?

Jones: So I'm a Boomer, and I'd say the senior faculty in every department in the country are Boomers. How do you prepare a Boomer to teach a Millennial? They need feedback and hand holding.

Interviewer: Sure.

Jones: They got awards for showing up. And I try to explain to the students that effort does not equal excellence. Effort is necessary for excellence, but it's not the same.

Now having said that, I'm not saying that the Boomers are right. I'm saying that it's a difference. So current Millennials want to know what's on the test. They want to know exactly what's expected of them. They want to know exactly what to do. And they want constant feedback, which is positive as to how they're doing.

The Boomers never expected that. The Boomers went out and just did it. We didn't get any feedback, good or bad. But mostly if we got it, it was bad. And we didn't ask too much about what we should be doing, because we figured we should be doing everything.

Interviewer: How do you reconcile that though because who really needs to change? Or is there a meeting in the middle?

Jones: So here's the reality. A teacher isn't a teacher unless the learner is learning. So the realities for the Boomers is that they have to create a learning environment appropriate for the learner. This is true whether they have an 80-year old woman in their clinic, that they're teaching about their medicine or a 30-year old resident or student. So you're not a teacher if your learner doesn't learn.

Boomers have to get on board and start thinking about what Millennials need and want, or they're not going to learn. So a disconnect never works in the teacher/learner dyad because information has to be going both ways. So getting grumpy about it doesn't work that well.

Announcer: Impossible problems in academic medicine. Hear how others are solving their impossible problems at AlgorithmsforInnovation.org.