In terms of feedback I've received, most of it relates to my skills as a doctor, and very little has been comment on my skills as an educator. And if you don't count the aggregated scores from near-useless lecture feedback forms, I've received almost no feedback about my teaching. In fact, I really don't count those forms - the quantitative questions are so vague they're only useful for comparing yourself to the other speakers in a putative best-speaker competition. There is no specific information from this that can inform self-improvement.
Recently for the MSc in Geriatric Medicine (Teaching/Communication Module) I'm working towards, I completed an assigment on devising a multi-source feedback survey on one aspect of my teaching skills. The process, results and reflection was delivered by means of PowerPoint slides. This is it...
Appraising my Teaching Skills using MSF
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Notes:
1. Now, for those of you who don't know me, I'm not the kind of person that thinks of himself as intimidating. I'm a 5'7" geriatrics reg, ex-computer game reviewer, briefly a stand-up comedian. Not that these things define me or negate the possibility that I'm a scary, dastardly figure. But it's not something that's really come up very often, and frankly quite the opposite of my self-image, which is why I decided to explore the issue with my MSF. It seems I can be intimidating, to a few juniors. In fact this shouldn't be such a surprise, really. I've got just over 2 years until I'm a consultant, for many of them I'm 2-3 grades up in the professional hierarchy, I'm the teacher, I've (usually) got more knowledge than them... What do I do about it, though?
2. I don't actually think I'm Pete 'Maverick' Mitchell in Top Gun. But we do share a surname. And a nickname. Not really. But doing an MSF on yourself, about an aspect of your professional identity you're quite proud of is quite a challenge to self-image. That's what I was discussing with these slides.
3. Yes, the PPT slides are a bit wordy. But words mean points mean prizes (for the MSc markers).
4. HT to @nlafferty, who worked on the original DREEM, and pointed me towards the PHEEM (more relevant to F1s generally but less about teaching style, so I ended up using the DREEM as inspiration). The people you meet on Twitter...
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Colin
ReplyDeleteYou have me thinking about feedback again. What did you think was the most you would have gained from this exercise? Why do you think that you didn't learn much new? Was it becuase you already had a good idea about what your weaknesses were and picked questions that specifically asked about this?
Following projects from just a powerpoint can be difficult so I have probably just missed out on aspects.
Thanks
Anne Marie
I think the most useful thing I learned is that good quality feedback has the potential to be really useful, but extracting it from people is REALLY difficult. So if I want to improve and either find out about weaknesses I'm unaware of, or discover more about those that I do know about, I need to find ways of obtaining that information that are high-yield.
ReplyDeleteStandard feedback forms for teaching sessions are essentially worthless, but even a focussed, reasonably well-designed MSF told me little new. Obvious problems with this exercise are small sample size, variability of the rater's experiences with me (some having done multiple ward rounds, some only the odd bit of teaching on the acute medical ward) and lack of any contextual information about the rater to help me focus on what kind of learneres react best / worst to my teaching style.
One of the issues that was covered in the discussions from the various SpRs presenting that day was about anonymity. I was the only person who did the MSF online with genuine anonymity, everyone else did it on paper and had a pretty good idea / were absolutely certain who the comments had come from. I felt doing the thing anonymously freed the commenters to be more honest, and most people agreed. However it made contextualising the feedback and applying it in a meaningful way extremely difficult.
I think I'm going to design a different teachin- session feedback form of my own, administer it after every session (rather than using departmental standard ones) and try to convince people to do it online. Once I have enough data from multiple sessions I can see if any trends or themes emerge. If not, back to the drawing board I guess...
A valuable post on Self Improvement
ReplyDeleteThanks,
Karim - Positive thinking