Tips on Leading A Teaching
Conference
Tom Newman
Bob Kamei
Carrie Chen
2/4/04
The most important criterion
to use selecting a topic is whether it interests YOU. If you find the topic boring, it will be hard to interest the
audience. It’s a good idea to keep a list of topics you want to know more
about. If you don’t have such a list,
think about a topic you want to spend some time investigating. Good sources of topics are clinical issues
that have come up in your care of patients.
Were there instances where you were uncertain about what to do, were
given conflicting advice by others, or where you disagreed with the advice you
were given? Were there questions that
came up to which you could not get a ready answer from textbooks? These make good topics.
It is nice (but not
essential) to choose the topic based upon a case that you saw. Think about what made the case difficult or
interesting. If it was a diagnostic
dilemma, make the focus of the talk the symptom(s) (e.g., bloody diarrhea), not
the disease (Campylobacter enteritis).
On the other hand, if the main issue of interest was management (e.g.,
encopresis), focus on that. It is OK to change the story somewhat to emphasize
the clinical dilemma or to make a point.
Be willing to think
outside the box. There is a lot more to
medicine than what you’ll find in textbooks, and many ways to teach besides
PowerPoint. See if you can come up with
a conference that includes some experiential learning. For example, when Elisa Sohn (a resident who
finished in 2003) gave a talk about hearing loss, she played tapes of
conversation from which certain sound frequencies had been removed, and we got
to experience how hard it was to understand speech without those frequencies.
It is a good idea to spend
at least 15 minutes looking into a potential topic before recruiting your
preceptor. This means at least reading a few pages in a textbooks or two, and
perhaps doing a quick search to see what sort of articles have been published
on the topic lately.
A copy of the handout for
faculty preceptors is attached. The preceptor can be a general pediatrics
faculty member or a member of a subspecialty division. The preceptor can also be someone who has a
primary appointment outside of pediatrics (e.g., orthopedics, dermatology) or
someone from elsewhere within the medical center (physical therapy, social
work, pharmacy) or the community (e.g., health department), as long as that
person agrees to help you prepare the talk, attend it, and give you feedback on
how you did. (We prefer the mentor be a
faculty member, not a fellow, however.)
Preparing a talk with a
faculty member is a good way to get to know him or her. Many residents who are interested in a
subspecialty may want to identify a preceptor from their field of interest.
You can decide with your
preceptor how many times, when, and for how long you meet. You might want to
wait until you have sent him or her a draft of a PowerPoint presentation or
handout, or you might want to meet (or at least talk on the phone) earlier to
get guidance about how to learn about your topic.
It’s good to start with
reviews – text books, Clinics of North America, etc. The less you know at baseline, the greater the percentage of what
you learn can come from these sources.
But do not rely totally on reviews.
After all, if all your audience wants to know is what’s in textbooks,
they can read them when they want to know that material a lot more efficiently
than they can get it from you.
You should plan on doing a
literature search and reviewing at least a few original articles. If your focus is on diagnosis, it’s helpful
to find one or more articles that describe the evaluation of a series of
patients with the presenting complaint of interest, so you can see the relative
likelihood of different diagnoses and see what clinical features or laboratory
tests were most useful in distinguishing between them. If your focus is on management, look for
systematic reviews (if it is a common problem) or randomized trials (if it is
less common) by using the Clinical Queries feature of Pubmed. Look not just for statistical significance –
try to get some evidence of the effect size. What is the number-needed-to-treat? (For definitions of
these, see TN’s handout “Suggestions for Leading a Journal Club,” available at http://itsa.ucsf.edu/~newman/JOCLUB.htm.)
One thing that usually is
NOT in textbooks is costs (or charges).
For medications, you can fairly easily look these up (e.g., with
Epocrates or on the web at www.internationalpharmacy.com.) For laboratory tests or imaging studies,
you can call the relevant UCSF department for charges. (What insurance actually pays is less, but
as more and more patients lack insurance of have high deductibles, charges
become more relevant.) If you can get access to the medications (and it is
safe) you might want to taste them.
Another thing that is
helpful is to look at patient information handouts. Do we have one in the clinic?
Is it the best one you can find?
Is there one on MD Consult? If
you look at some patient information handouts and find the best one (perhaps in
consultation with your preceptor) copy the file to the hard disk in the Urgent
Care Conference Room. (Eventually we
may be able to get our own handouts up on a UCSF Pediatrics Website!)
This is helpful to you as
you figure out how you are going to use your conference time. It also is helpful for participants if you
tell them what you are going to say ahead of time and have signposts every
10-15 minutes to let people know where you are.. People like to know what is coming, and what is coming next, and
sometimes can help you keep on track if they know where you are going. For example if you are only half way through
what you wanted to cover and the time is 75% gone, people may hold off on
asking a lot of questions. On the other
hand, if it looks like you have plenty of time, people will feel freer to
participate.
This may sound hokey, but
it helps to think about your OBJECTIVES for the talk. What message is it that you want your audience to take home? You can be very specific about these. For example, you can say, “At the end of
this talk I want you to be able to name the 3 most common and the 2 most
serious causes of cyanosis in newborns.”
During the conference, you want to tell them what you plan to tell them,
tell them and then tell them what you told them.
How interactive do you
want to make it? Lectures are usually
boring, and people don’t retain as much from them as they do when their role is
less passive. On the other hand, the
larger the group, the less each person can participate.
One problem is that the
audience will be heterogeneous – from third-year medical students to R3’s,
fellows and faculty. One way to keep
the more senior people interested is to invite them to contribute examples. embellishments
and pearls from their own experience.
If you do want to present
a lot of material as a lecture, at least think about places where you can get
the audience involved, and ALWAYS leave plenty of space for questions.
Think about what kind of
information they want to hear. What do
they already know about the subject? What can you do to grab their
interest? (Present a case? Tell what might happen if they don’t learn
what you are teaching?) One generally
useful teaching tip is always to provide the 3 most common ways that people
mess up.
Practice the talk,
preferably out loud, and with an audience (partner, friend, colleague) that can
make some suggestions as to what was unclear, dangerous to say (be especially
careful about jokes) or possibly not correct.
This is not absolutely
required, but it is a good way to capture the most valuable lessons you learned
from giving the talk, and it will definitely help you learn the material
better. It also provides a nice
concrete opportunity for your preceptor to review what you’ve written and make
suggestions.
Make sure the handout has
your name and the date. Undated,
anonymous handouts belong in the recycling bin.
The meeting with your preceptor
can be before or after you have a draft/ plan for your talk or both. The main goals are to get suggestions, get
your questions answered, and get feedback on any handout you are planning to
distribute. But there’s another goal,
too. This is a chance for you and a
faculty member tp get to know one another a little better. It’s good if the
preceptor is willing or eager to get his or her name on the handout, either as
a co-author, an acknowledgement, or “reviewed by:”
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO
MEET FOR LUNCH, THE DEPARTMENT WILL PROVIDE $10 IN CREDIT AT THE MOFFITT
CAFETERIA!
There’s no point going to
a lot of trouble preparing something if no one shows up. Make sure that people know when you are
speaking and that you are hoping to see them there. In addition to the faculty preceptor for your talk, invite your
faculty residency advisor to attend as well.
Don’t hesitate to invite any other faculty. If they attend, they may be
able to help with the questions/answer/discussion..
Sometimes the AV stuff
does not work the first time, and speakers look helpless and surprised when
this happens and their audience’s time is wasted. Good speakers value their audience’s time and are conscientious,
so they arrive early and make sure everything works ahead of time. The PowerPoint presentation should be
checked to make sure the computers are compatible with the projector. Have the presentation on a floppy disk ( if
it fits) a CD-ROM, or even better a USB drive (they are pretty inexpensive and
work on all Windows 2000, XP and Mac computers). That also means making sure that there is a good DryErase marker
if you are going to use one, that the board is clean, that the chairs are in
the position that you want them in.
Arriving early may also allow you to change the seating arrangements;
you might choose a more informal scattered sitting arrangement for a group
discussion, or a more organized rows of seating for a formal lecture.
For AM conferences, for
which lunch is not provided, it’s nice to bring food. Tom Newman will reimburse you up to $20 for food for each AM
conference if you give him the receipts.
This means start at no
later than 10 after the hour and end about 55 minutes past the hour. NO ONE WILL BE MAD AT YOU FOR ENDING
EARLY!!! If you run out of
material, you can always ask your preceptor for comments, or open it up for
questions to the preceptor.
Room M-666 has notoriously
poor acoustics, especially if windows are open and it’s noisy in the
courtyard. If some one asks a question
or gives an answer that others can’t hear, repeat it for the group (or ask them
to). Sometimes you can abbreviate and
clarify what they said at the same time.
You yourself should be standing rather than sitting. . Talk to your
audience, not the screen, and make eye contact with several different people in
the room.
Don’t worry, your talk
will be fine. Practicing helps. Here are the 3 most common ways that people
mess up:
If you can avoid these 3
things, you will be ahead of the game!
This can be brief – about
5 minutes. Evaluate yourself
first. What did you think you
did well? What would you do differently
next time?
Also, if you are
comfortable, let the preceptor know what he or she did that you found helpful,
and provide any suggestions about how he or she could do better next time.
For example, if you gave a
talk about acne medications, make sure that patient information handouts and
your handout that go over the medications, their costs, risks, and indications
will be available for others to use in the future.
Please pass on any suggestions for improvement!