Face Time

There is a new item on the conference room schedule. Once a week, a small group of resident meets with a faculty member for "education sessions". However, among the faculty, in conversation and in email, these sessions are referred to quite seriously as "face-time".

The development of this term this summer sheds some light on how we grapple with new ideas about education.

Frankly, sometimes our learners have seemed less than enthused about proposed additions to the education programs. A whiff of outright hostility emerged in response to the idea that tests might be included in the new technology, and educators would be able to track individual performance and time invested in the learning modules. We were puzzled. We were expecting more in the way of huzzahs. Do the new learners want no risk, 100% return, and edutainment?

When I ask the learners about this response, they talk about the amount of tasks already assigned to them. They have a lot of teaching responsibilities in the form of short powerpoint presentations to their colleagues, on which, despite frequent urging to reuse last year's presentation and keep it simple, many of them put in hours and hours of labor. They present at journal clubs, submit cases and abstracts to resident regional conferences, and also at professional meetings. They are not interested in having something else shoved onto their plates.

I detect another, more important, issue here. Many of the educational activities we as faculty get excited about are those that learners can do on their own, without faculty presence. A great deal of benefit, flexibility, and accomodation of multiple personal and learning styles as well as standardization of educational experiences can be achieved in this way. But there is a point at which the learner may begin to wonder how much of this is driven by faculty desire to spend less time with learners.

We seek the grail of "active learning". I was molded (and anesthetized) by a lifetime of learning experiences handed down from a podium, as were most of my colleagues. I may be in medicine because so much of learning was hands-on, problem-solving, and the answers mattered so deeply to actual people: I stayed awake! I would describe many of my learning experiences in medicine as apprentice-like, and I hear comments from colleagues that imply many of us still operate with that mental model. (See one, do one, teach one).

So when the residents and others began chanting "active learning! active learning!", educational technology to provide independent learning was very attractive. And there was less and less comfort with apprentice-style learning perhaps without full awareness of the discomfort, and definitely without identifying a better way to do it. So, as we previously threw out almost all lectures as too "didactic", perhaps we faculty were disconnecting from the learners. No longer saying, do what I do, but, you need to be responsible for your own education -- go figure it out.

So in response to a frustrated question of "what DO they want" we decided that maybe the residents still wanted us, not the technology. They need us to help them make the connections in what they are learning that will lead to expertise. They want our guidance to become experts.

They want "face-time".

It doesn't say it on the schedule, and the conference room that is reserved shows the listing as "educational sessions", but the faculty refer to it orally and in email, as the weekly scheduled "face-time."