April 30th - attending a discussion at McMaster about how hospital cutback decisions are made? I'm interested in understanding more about how the Local Health Integration's Network (LHIN) came to the decision of making the emergency ward at McMaster Hospital peds-only in the face of public protest. Many people question whether this decision was made democratically with adequate public consultation (as far as I'm aware, students attending the university were not included in any talks), raising concerns about the LHIN's role at the local level. An ombuds investigation is currently underway to determine the legitimacy of these concerns.
I expect a raucous debate to ensue between the four different speakers (LHIN director, prez of HHS, MPP, and a rep. from the Ontario Health Coalition).
May 6th - attending Research Day for the Health Policy, Management, and Evaluation (HPME) Department at UofT. Looking forward to hearing guest speakers, networking with future colleagues, and looking at research posters. If med school doesn't work out for me this year, I will be doing graduate studies at the Master's level in Health Services Research.
The keynote speaker of the day is Kathleen Sutcliffe and she will be talking about "Organizing for Resilience." Seems interesting that her talk will bring a business flavour to the management of medical errors, a topic that I've only learned about from a bioethics perspective. Resilience is a word that also carries a lot of meaning in the psychology world, especially in the field of child development studies.
According to the day's schedule, a panel discussion will focus on accessing and integrating Mental Health Care. On April 15th, I attended Research Day for the Department of Psychology, Behaviour, and Neurosciences at McMaster University. The theme, which was on Psychiatric Disorder, Epidemiology and the Life Course, helped me conceptualize mental health disorders as developmental processes that are expressed in different ways over the lifespan. Given this paradigm shift, it is a daunting task for health policy-makers to ensure that mental health services are provided to those who need it. As a society, we may be better at identifying and framing mental health problems, but it remains to be determined whether we will have success in managing them on a system-wide level.
May 7th - participating in the second annual Hamilton Economic Summit. I was drawn to this community event because of the prospect of learning more about commercializing the downtown sector of Hamilton in order to create opportunities for economic development. I think the university can play an important role in this operation, and evidence of this is already emerging with the expansion of health services and education. Perhaps this may be a solution to the poverty issue in Hamilton.
Exciting days lined up for the next two weeks. I am clearly not ready to move on to the real world...
WC
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
Teaching to Learn, Learning to Teach
Two weekends ago, I went for training to become a certified Princeton Review teacher for the MCAT. Princeton Review is a for-profit company that helps students prepare for standardized tests. Friday night of that week, I learned a bit about company policy and how my role as a teacher is important for furthering the business prospects of the organization. It was drilled in my head that the training weekend was to be taken seriously, and I got a good taste of what it means to be a professional.
Being a professional means living up to the standards of a company. With the Princeton Review, I had to demonstrate knowledge of the teaching material and show my ability to convey information in a simple, logical, and structured way. Although this may seem like an easy task for some people, it wasn't for me. I struggled with conforming to the didactic teaching style of the company because, as a student on the receiving end, I know my own personal limits of this model. Lectures can be helpful for giving a brief overview of new material, but they hardly foster learning and retention at a deeper level. The problem with lecture-based classes is that they prohibit students from taking initiative in their learning because the lecturer decides what the students should know. Postman and Weingartner argue that it is more important to "actively investigate structures and relationships in one's learning process, rather than being passively receptive to someone else's (the teacher's) story" (1). Interestingly, problem-based learning aims to provide students with more control over their curriculum, so that an element of personal preference is factored in. At the same time, how do we know that our specific learning style (which we've grown quite accustomed to) is the one that best maximizes our productivity as learners? Comfort can be misconstrued as resistance to change. While I was thinking about this, I couldn't help but realize that conforming to a proscribed way of teaching challenged my integrity as a learner. My roles as a teacher and a student were at once in conflict.
There is a way to resolve this intrapersonal conflict. It starts with admitting that didactic learning has its advantages. For one, it's practical. At the undergraduate level, juggling a full course load plus any other extracurriculars is hard enough as is, so it helps make life easier if learning material is "fed" to us in a structured and sequential fashion. The same can be said about an MCAT prep course, where time constraints are imposed by juggling meaty subjects such as verbal reasoning, general chemistry, biology, physics, and organic chemistry. In addition, learning through a lecture format is helpful for acquiring a condensed version of a specific subset of knowledge. This can open the door to deeper levels of analysis that serve to compliment, rather than substitute, other learning styles. For this reason, it's no surprise that the Princeton Review stresses the importance of doing several hours of indepedent homework after class. I suspect that these reasons, and several others, challenge the effectiveness of using anything other than lectures to teach MCAT material.
So how does lecture-based learning prepare someone to score well on a standardized test (which is the main outcome of interest for test prep companies)? A standardized test almost always contains multiple-choice questions with one answer that is more right than the others. In a similar way, didactic learning promotes the acceptance of reaching a one-answer state because those things that have no answers (or even multiple ones) are not fun to teach and rather time-consuming.
Perhaps there is room for problem-based approach learning in the standardized test prep business. I don't know if there is a market for something like this at the moment, but I would suspect that there is little data to show how effective it is in this setting. As long as standardized tests play a role in establishing didactic practices as the dominant paradigm of educational learning, they will continue to stifle the growth of more open-ended, active, and motivational ways of learning.
WC
(1) "The Inquiry Method"
Postman, N. & Weingartner, C.
Teaching as a Subversive Activity
Being a professional means living up to the standards of a company. With the Princeton Review, I had to demonstrate knowledge of the teaching material and show my ability to convey information in a simple, logical, and structured way. Although this may seem like an easy task for some people, it wasn't for me. I struggled with conforming to the didactic teaching style of the company because, as a student on the receiving end, I know my own personal limits of this model. Lectures can be helpful for giving a brief overview of new material, but they hardly foster learning and retention at a deeper level. The problem with lecture-based classes is that they prohibit students from taking initiative in their learning because the lecturer decides what the students should know. Postman and Weingartner argue that it is more important to "actively investigate structures and relationships in one's learning process, rather than being passively receptive to someone else's (the teacher's) story" (1). Interestingly, problem-based learning aims to provide students with more control over their curriculum, so that an element of personal preference is factored in. At the same time, how do we know that our specific learning style (which we've grown quite accustomed to) is the one that best maximizes our productivity as learners? Comfort can be misconstrued as resistance to change. While I was thinking about this, I couldn't help but realize that conforming to a proscribed way of teaching challenged my integrity as a learner. My roles as a teacher and a student were at once in conflict.
There is a way to resolve this intrapersonal conflict. It starts with admitting that didactic learning has its advantages. For one, it's practical. At the undergraduate level, juggling a full course load plus any other extracurriculars is hard enough as is, so it helps make life easier if learning material is "fed" to us in a structured and sequential fashion. The same can be said about an MCAT prep course, where time constraints are imposed by juggling meaty subjects such as verbal reasoning, general chemistry, biology, physics, and organic chemistry. In addition, learning through a lecture format is helpful for acquiring a condensed version of a specific subset of knowledge. This can open the door to deeper levels of analysis that serve to compliment, rather than substitute, other learning styles. For this reason, it's no surprise that the Princeton Review stresses the importance of doing several hours of indepedent homework after class. I suspect that these reasons, and several others, challenge the effectiveness of using anything other than lectures to teach MCAT material.
So how does lecture-based learning prepare someone to score well on a standardized test (which is the main outcome of interest for test prep companies)? A standardized test almost always contains multiple-choice questions with one answer that is more right than the others. In a similar way, didactic learning promotes the acceptance of reaching a one-answer state because those things that have no answers (or even multiple ones) are not fun to teach and rather time-consuming.
Perhaps there is room for problem-based approach learning in the standardized test prep business. I don't know if there is a market for something like this at the moment, but I would suspect that there is little data to show how effective it is in this setting. As long as standardized tests play a role in establishing didactic practices as the dominant paradigm of educational learning, they will continue to stifle the growth of more open-ended, active, and motivational ways of learning.
WC
(1) "The Inquiry Method"
Postman, N. & Weingartner, C.
Teaching as a Subversive Activity
4 am...
Another night of dancing, drinks, and socializing. Another night of pizza and junk food. Another night with new company. And yet I am sitting in front of my computer at 4:14 am with a feeling of uneasiness and a lack of fulfillment. Did I have a good time?
As a sense of fatigue envelops me, I can't help but wonder if I'm growing old of this type of "having fun." I'm going to wake up sometime after noon tomorrow, and I'll look back at the night to see what I've accomplished. Does something need to be accomplished if the sole purpose of doing it is just to have fun? Maybe. I get the feeling that I'm always looking for more.
But look at me 5 hours ago and you would have seen a completely different person. I was dying to leave the house and celebrate the end of exams and, frankly, the end of my undergrad. I was led to believe that this monumental occasion would translate to a most memorable night.
I think I'm coming to understand what I value in my social life. Drinking, dancing, and music are not always needed, although they certainly help to lighten the mood. Close friends help make the night more personal. Last but not least, humour and food are always a good combination in moderation. In conclusion, what does it take to make social outings "fun" on a regular basis?
Oddly enough, the only way to find out is by going out more...
WC
As a sense of fatigue envelops me, I can't help but wonder if I'm growing old of this type of "having fun." I'm going to wake up sometime after noon tomorrow, and I'll look back at the night to see what I've accomplished. Does something need to be accomplished if the sole purpose of doing it is just to have fun? Maybe. I get the feeling that I'm always looking for more.
But look at me 5 hours ago and you would have seen a completely different person. I was dying to leave the house and celebrate the end of exams and, frankly, the end of my undergrad. I was led to believe that this monumental occasion would translate to a most memorable night.
I think I'm coming to understand what I value in my social life. Drinking, dancing, and music are not always needed, although they certainly help to lighten the mood. Close friends help make the night more personal. Last but not least, humour and food are always a good combination in moderation. In conclusion, what does it take to make social outings "fun" on a regular basis?
Oddly enough, the only way to find out is by going out more...
WC
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
First Blog!
Hello all,
I've decided to start blogging because I feel to need to put my thoughts down on paper and reflect on personal experiences. I was never a big fan of writing, but I think there is some value in documenting your thinking in a systematic and analytical way. I am primarily interested in blogging about health care related issues, but occasionally I feel the need to ponder on personal aspects of my life. As an aspiring doctor, I know that blogging will encourage introspection in an environment where difficult decisions are made on a daily basis.
So...a little bit about myself. I am 21-years old and just finished a 4-year undergrad at McMaster University. I applied to med school this year and hope to receive good news on May 15th. If that doesn't work out, then I will be doing graduate studies in health policy at UofT. I currently live in a house off-campus with my best friends of 3 years: Michael, Davide, and Gabriel. They say that some of your best relationships are established in your university years - I can certainly attest to that.
My family lives in Toronto and I see them often. My mom and dad own a family business (an optical store), while my brother practices as a chiropodist (or foot care specialist) in his new clinic. Family is a central aspect of my life. I can tell my parents anything over a half-chicken dinner at Swiss Chalet or a BBQ pork & rice dish with bak choy at Congee Queen. During stressful moments in my undergrad, I have relied on my parents for social support (and a lot of other things too, such as $). It goes without saying that they go out of their way to offer me advice and are always willing to listen to my concerns (however small and insignificant they are). I've learned that conflicts between family members are a necessary aspect of developing strong relationships. When arguments erupt, they can be healthy for building relationships if the family member at fault learns to be apologetic. I've had my fair share of arguments with my mom, dad, and brother. We know which buttons to press to make each of us mad, but at the end there is always reconciliation.
The past 4 years at McMaster University in the Bachelor of Health Sciences program has been extremely rewarding. I intend to blog more about the uniqueness of this program and how it serves as a model for teaching and learning at the post-secondary level. Looking back at my undergrad career, I really think that I found my niche at McMaster, socially and academically. It's a small enough institution that you can recognize familiar people on campus, but large enough to keep you excited about exploring different dimensions of university life. I have no regrets for making the decision of coming here (the other contender was UofT) and I am proud of the opportunities it created for me. If I attend another university next year, I wonder what the transition will be like...something to blog about in the near future.
Anyways, that's all for now. More to come. Thanks for reading.
WC
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