Archive for June, 2011

Fast Track

Thursday, June 23rd, 2011

The U.S. needs to produce more doctors yet medical training takes several years, costs thousands of dollars, and selects a small portion of the applicants. The University of Texas is starting a program that streamlines the process, granting a bachelor’s degree and a medical degree in as few as six years.

The 60 students admitted to the new program would demonstrate high academic achievement in high school. If they maintain good grades, upon graduation they are guaranteed a slot at the UT medical schools in Dallas or Houston.

By integrating medical education into the undergraduate curriculum, students would avoid the traditional fourth year electives of medical school. They would also enjoy the option of pursuing a master’s in public health or a research project for an additional year.

Texas Tech already offers a three-year medical degree for students going into primary care. Some law schools have shortened their professional programs from three to two years. As debt remains a concern for aspiring doctors, shortening the time they have to pay tuition may draw a wider pool of potential candidates.

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Posted in Faculty development | 214 Comments »

Plagiarism

Monday, June 20th, 2011

The Dean of the University of Alberta's Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry is stepping down because he plagiarized a commencement speech. In his address to this year's graduates, the dean repeated several passages verbatim from a speech Atul Gawande gave to Stanford Medical School students in 2010.

There's been no explanation for why the dean plagiarized the speech. In my experience as a classroom teacher, plagiarism becomes a temptation if the assignment is ill-defined, the timeline for producing it is too short, or the writer is unable to grasp the material. In the case of the dean, it's not likely that a commencement speech assignment caught him by surprise or that he lacked understanding of the occasion.

More likely, it's the vague role of a commencement speech that motivated him to look to other models. These speeches have to be memorable yet anodyne, uplifting yet realistic. Gawande does seem to have a knack for the pithy platitudes  (as evidenced by his address this year at Harvard Medical School). Even if a dean can't match Gawande's wisdom, it's always better to deliver an honest speech and one that reflects the values of the particular institution.

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Posted in Faculty development | 470 Comments »

Assessing Assessment

Friday, June 17th, 2011

Last week BU hosted John McCahan Medical Education Day, a symposium dedicated to innovation, research, and technology in teaching. Martha Stassen, Director of Assessment at U Mass Amherst, delivered the keynote address in defense of assessment. Borrowing from Atul Gawande's work on checklists, she argued that assessment can not only prevent errors but also enhance teaching.

One example of her argument is the biomedical engineer George Plopper, featured in a profile on Inside Higher Ed. After encountering Bloom's taxonomy, Plopper restructured his undergraduate classes on cancer biology to integrate assessment into the syllabus. Instead of lecture, memorization, and test, Plopper's classes now students analyze the subject matter themselves, teach it to each other, and apply it in realistic scenarios.

Plopper evaluates students on each of these tasks, pegging his assessment to specific terms in Bloom's taxonomy. With the new focus on project-based learning, he measured quantitative gains in instances of higher order thinking. Rather than a burdensome task, being explicit about assessment helped improve student outcomes.

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Posted in Faculty development | 98 Comments »

Pfizer in Boston

Thursday, June 9th, 2011

The giant pharmaceutical company Pfizer already has partnerships with academic medical centers in San Francisco and New York City. Now they're adding Boston. According to a press release, the company will house its Center for Therapeutic Innovation in the Longwood area and invest $100 million over five years to bring basic science discoveries to clinical applications.

The semi-autonomous center will be headed by a Pfizer scientist but draw postdocs from academic medical centers. A brochure describes that faculty from academic medical centers will be involved on a steering committee that helps decide projects and monitors conflicts of interest. Important to note in light of a recent U.S. Supreme Court decision involving a Stanford biomedical researcher, Pfizer retains first right to license any clinical probes that come out of the research.

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Posted in Faculty development | 4 Comments »

Steal This Book!

Friday, June 3rd, 2011

The National Academies Press is making all its entire catalog of 4,000 books available for free reading online or download. Some of the titles relevant to medical school faculty:

You can still buy physical copies of the book, but if you'd like to skim a portion, this is a valuable resource. It's also helpful to scholars in institutions without large library budgets.

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Posted in Faculty development | 27 Comments »

Best Practices in Gender Diversity

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

Women receive over 50% of doctorates in the United States, but they make up only 38% of the instructional workforce. Women faculty are more likely to have lower rank, less job security, and lower pay than their male colleagues.

A report from the American Federation of Teachers offers some concrete advice on how to remedy the gender gap in higher education. Their recommendations include:

  • Encourage the institution to develop a diversity mission and strategic plan.
  • Educate hiring committees about the plan and offer them training in gender bias.
  • Establish protocols for the hiring process.
  • Promote cluster-based hiring to bring in a cohort of women faculty.
  • Create a travel fund that allows faculty to take small children with them to academic conferences.
  • Measure departmental success against national benchmarks

These changes have more to do with prioritizing than providing additional resources. The pipeline problem can no longer be used as an excuse for the low representation of women faculty. By developing an overall plan and implementing concrete steps, a university can close the gender gap.

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Posted in Faculty development | 17 Comments »