Different Styles of Medical Teaching

Seminar with Dragan Gaševič

Image by hanspoldoja via Flickr

There are many people who wish to pursue a career in medicine but find that they first must make it through a rigorous medical school course. These courses help to instruct those in the medical field while simultaneously weeding out those who cannot stand the pace and demands of the medical profession.

The styles of teaching vary from teacher to teacher and subject to subject. These different styles are a great advantage to those seeking healthcare careers, as students will be exposed to different ways of thinking and arriving at medical answers.

Currently, the most effective and popular methods of medical teaching include lectures, problem-based learning (PBL), tutorials, seminars, and one-on-one teaching scenarios.  Each one has strengths and weaknesses in helping to educate the student.

Lectures tend to be highly efficient, but miss much in terms of active learning and providing effective student feedback. Seminar teaching provides more opportunities for active learning situations and allows for more feedback than simply lecturing, but this method often shows a drop in overall efficiency in the learning model.

PBL provides the most active learning and student feedback, but this kind of interaction diminishes overall efficiency. Tutorials are similar in that efficiency isn’t very high, but active learning is better and feedback is high.

One-on-one teaching is the lowest in efficiency but the highest in both active learning and student feedback.

Each method has strengths that students are going to gain from, and though there is no perfect model, when they are combined they provide an excellent learning structure.

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Understanding Your Learning Style

There’s a lot to know about your learning style. Some people are visual learners, who do best by seeing something done and then mimicking the behavior until mastery is achieved. Others learn the best by reading material until it is held in their brains like air in a tire. Still, others prefer to hear something first, take notes on the lecture, and complement that by reading similar material out of the textbook afterwards.

Whatever the learning style you favor, it’s best to be certain exactly what it is to maximize your potential. Anyone interested in getting a master degree will face challenges along the road. Figuring out what gets your own brain working full force will maximize your chances of success. Aside from learning styles, there are also teaching styles to consider.

A traditional, or classroom experience is more familiar to most people, except those who have been home schooled. But a different option exists in the form of online classes. These can offer a learning style that provides more of what you prefer, particularly if the rapid pacing of the typical lecture is anathema to your mind’s absorbing capability. Slow and steady not only wins races, but it may be your preferred method of learning course material. Online courses offer myriad other advantages as well. Chief among those is equal student to professor interaction time. In a classroom setting, certain students can tend to monopolize the teacher’s time, efforts, and intellect to their own problems and questions. An online format opens the door to equal time, allowing your comprehension of material to be as full as possible.

 

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