Teaching the Harvard Medical School students

Pictured below are some photos that the 2nd year Harvard Medical School students and I took together. They came to the Brockton VA every other Tuesday throughout the fall of 2008. Some of the attending psychiatrists and senior psychiatry residents (such as me, the Senior Teaching Resident) provided them with the opportunity to practice their interview skills. Moreover, we offered them didactic lectures that highlighted certain psychiatric illnesses. At the end of their fall curriculum with us, I solely provided them with a 3 hour, comprehensive review course that covered most of the material that they had been exposed to during the preceding months. My teaching vehicle was case vignettes that covered 4 common psychiatric disorders, with questions that followed. I split the 12 Harvard Medical School students into two teams, much like Family Feud game show style. Each team was given an opportunity to read and provide an answer for the question after they discussed the options quietly among themselves. If they were correct, they won points; if they were not, then they were deducted points and the opposing team was allowed to offer an alternative answer if they wished to submit an answer. The feedback from the 12 medical students afterwards was 100% positive. They found that this method of teaching (case vignette + game show style active participation) "was fun, fantastic and educational! I wish we did more learning like this." You can see this by the smiles on each of their faces.

This style of teaching is very similar to what I did in the fall of 2008 with the entire Harvard South Shore Psychiatry Residency Training Program when I was asked to develop a Knowledge Base Review course (K.B.R.) that would be helpful to enhance not only general psychiatry knowledge, but also elevate/improve our annual standardized PRITE exam scores (Psychiatry Residency In Training Examination). I created and presented a one hour didactic focused on a sub speciality field in Psychiatry (i.e. Geriatrics, Consultation-Liaison, Psychotherapies, Forensic Psychiatry, etc), and this didactic lecture (via a PowerPoint presentation) was followed by active game show style learning (a mixture of Jeopardy/Family Feud). I wrote, but not published, an Abstract about this academic intervention.