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Archive for the ‘education’ Category

September – time to think about learning

Posted in creativity, education, from the living room, life on September 1, 2011| 3 Comments »

september learning

I remember taking part in a small group once which opened with asking everyone to say which month was their favourite month, and why. One of my colleagues said September because that was the beginning of the Academic Year. I liked that response and I’ve always remembered it.
I have many criticisms of our educational system and institutions, and what I really believe is that everyone should learn all the time. I am insatiably curious which drives my constant desire to learn.
However, this time of year is the time when the universities and colleges publish their programmes for “adult” or “continuing” education classes, so I think it’s a great time to plan what you’d like to learn in the coming weeks.
My most recent experience was a course in artists photographic book self-publishing. If you’d like see what I produced have a look here.
What would YOU like to learn next?

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Penn Reading Project

Posted in art, education on August 17, 2009| Leave a Comment »

The University of Pennsylvania usually sets a book for their new students to read over the summer before term begins. It’s a way of introducing their freshmen to academic life. This year, however, they’ve set a painting to be studied instead of a book.

They’ve chosen the local artist, Thomas Eakins and his 1875 painting “The Gross Clinic”. The university has another of Eakins’ paintings in its collection – the 1889 Agnew Clinic.

I think this is a very interesting development, and I’m not aware of any other universities which set a painting for everyone to study and discuss in this way.

Which painting would you choose for all the new students at your local university to study?

I’m pretty sure one of my first choices would “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp” (which happens to be one of my all time most viewed posts!)

Any suggestions?

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Two mindsets – fixed and growth

Posted in books, education, from the reading room, life, psychology on August 4, 2008| 8 Comments »

Stanford university psychologist, Carol Dweck has published a book entitled “Mindset. The New Psychology of Success” (ISBN 978-0-345-47232-8). Guy Kawasaki posted about it, and wrote a commendation which is printed on the front page. And Stanford Magazine did an article about it last year.

She’s identified two “mindsets” in relation to how people approach challenges and effort.

When you enter a mindset, you enter a new world. In one world – the world of fixed traits – success is about proving you’re smart or talented. Validating yourself. In the other – the world of changing qualities – it’s about stretching yourself to learn something new. Developing yourself.

One point she made which struck me as surprising at first was that people with a fixed mindset often have had lots of praise. She makes the point that just telling your child they are clever, or wonderful, or whatever, sets up a belief system in them which can become fixed and she recommends instead praising children for their effort, for what they’ve learned. This is her key point really – that when you have a mindset about loving learning you can grow, but when you have a mindset where you think talents are fixed then you get stuck.

The fixed mindset limits achievement. It fills people’s minds with interfering thoughts, it makes effort disagreeable, and it leads to inferior learning strategies. What’s more, it makes other people into judges instead of allies. Whether we’re talking about Darwin or college students, important achievements require a clear focus, all-out effort, and a bottomless trunk full of strategies. Plus allies in learning. This is what the growth mindset gives people, and that’s why it helps their abilities grow and bear fruit.

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The importance of the person in medicine

Posted in education, from the consulting room, from the reading room, health on February 4, 2008| 8 Comments »

Sometimes these days, with the dominant biomedical model of health and illness it can seem like people don’t actually matter. The individual stories of patients are dismissed as anecdotes and treatments are divided into one of two categories “proven” or “unproven” on the basis of statistical analyses of clinical trials (experiments on pre-selected groups of volunteers). The implication is that what works in health care is the intervention, be that a drug or a surgical procedure. Who the patient is, and who the doctor is, seems to be of secondary, or, sadly frequently, of no importance at all.

Yet, if you are ever unwell, I bet it matters to you who you consult and how they behave. I think we all want to consult a doctor who, frankly, gives a damn! I know I do. How many of us would seek a health care system based on dispensing machines which dole out drugs after you input your symptoms?

Amazingly, this idea of the importance of the person in medicine is having to be fought for. So, it was with great interest that I read a review of a book in the BMJ this week. The book is “When Doctors become Patients” by Robert Klitzman (ISBN 978 0 19 532767 0). The author is a psychiatrist who became depressed and was so shaken by his experience of becoming a patient that he set about interviewing other doctors who had become patients too.

Time and again Klitzman found that becoming a patient transformed the doctors’ views (and of practice) of medicine.

Non-specific complaints, side effects such as weight gain and fatigue, fear, humiliation, and spirituality acquired new significance. Struggling to adhere to burdensome schedules, they became less draconian about poor adherence to treatment. In presenting medical information, they became aware of the importance of framing the information sensitively.

I guess this is not a surprise. You’d expect experience to change your views. However, you’ll probably find it more than a little shocking that the doctors needed the illness experience to figure this stuff out. We’re clearly missing something in medical education.

The phrase that really hit me between the eyes though was this –

In choosing their own doctor, most interviewees preferred bedside manner over technical skill.

It’s what I’ve always felt personally. I’ve always felt that what’s really important is that you find a person who cares, listens and puts your interests at the heart of the consultation. I take the technical skill bit as kind of a given. ALL doctors should have the technical skills they need to do the job and the processes of continuing education, annual appraisal and the coming revalidation procedures of the General Medical Council are all designed to ensure that. But what about the human bit? What about the importance of the person? We need to make this case more clearly. Too often, the technical skills are attended to, and then we stop.

Finally, the BMJ reviewer concludes –

Klitzman, like Gawande and Groopman, is part of a contemporary group of reflective doctors who, through their writings, contribute to the less palpable but nevertheless crucial moral, social, and experiential dimensions of medicine.

We need more of this. Maybe we are building a body of knowledge and opinion but we’re sadly lacking in the areas of research into the “experiential dimensions of medicine” and in providing medical education which considers this as of equal importance to the knowledge of drugs, trials and the technical skills required to do surgical procedures.

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How we learn – teaching and training

Posted in creativity, education, from the reading room on February 2, 2008| 4 Comments »

Pick the Brain has a great post about teaching and learning. It’s called The Movie Director’s Guide to Effective Teaching. In it, Victor Stachura, the author refers to William Glasser’s theories. Well, this is new to me. I’ve never heard of William Glasser. If you have, what do you think about his ideas and his suggestions? There’s a William Glasser Institute and my little browsing there so far has interested me. I want to find out more. Victor Stachura highlights something he read about learning and teaching from studying William Glasser –

“We Learn . . .
10% of what we read
20% of what we hear
30% of what we see
50% of what we see and hear
70% of what we discuss
80% of what we experience
95% of what we teach others.”

I don’t know about you, but that seems intuitively correct to me. I might take issue with the actual figures used and I also think it doesn’t allow for the processing preferences highlighted from the work of things like the NLP approach which helps us to understand that we are different and some process auditory information better than others, some visual information, and yet others kinesthetic information. However, with that in brackets, the overall thrust of this seems right.

If you are involved in teaching this is an important observation and if you want to learn, it’s equally important. It certainly highlights the importance of what is known as active learning. Sitting attempting to learn passively by just listening or just watching something isn’t easy. But when you have something to read, something to see and to hear, and then you discuss it, you will learn so much more. The challenge beyond that I think is to experience and to teach. I don’t know if you can experience much in a classroom, can you? Don’t you need to get out and actually live what you’re learning? I certainly think that’s true of medical training. Can’t see how you become a good doctor without actually doing it! That last step of teaching so works for me! I find that almost every time I teach, not only in the preparation stage, but also in the delivery, I learn something new myself.

I ran a training day based around characters in Lord of the Rings last week and not only did it convince me that I’ve learned more about my subject than ever, but the feedback from the students was about the best I’ve ever had. The day involved film clips from the Lord of the Rings movies and various small and plenary discussion groups. It was active and interactive all day long.

If you teach, how much do you use movie clips? I use them a lot. I find that not only do they combine the auditory and visual stimulation we need, but they are great for getting discussion going and, fundamentally, they provide the group with an experience – usually something involving both thought and emotion.

To return to the blog post which has seeded this one – the main focus of the piece refers to the “primacy-recency” phenomenon – the finding that we remember the first and last things in a sequence better than the things in the middle. Victor Stachura recommends we deal with this in teaching not just by putting important information at the beginning and the end, but by breaking up the lecture every 15 minutes with some audience exercise, or discussion, to keep attention from waning. He points out that good movie directors know this and change the pace of the movie frequently to achieve a similar effect.

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If it’s not fun, it’s hard to learn

Posted in education, from the reading room on January 9, 2008| 7 Comments »

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is an intersting author. He’s promoted the concept of ‘flow’ experiences from his research into happiness. This article by him is about education.

It has turned out that mass education is more difficult to achieve than we had anticipated. To close the gap between the rather dismal reality and earlier expectations, researchers and practitioners have placed their faith in teaching methods modeled on computers and other rational means for conveying information – which in turn were modeled on industrial production techniques and on military human systems design. The implicit hope has been that if we discover more and more rational ways of selecting, organizing, and distributing knowledge, children will learn more effectively.

Yet it seems increasingly clear that the chief impediments to learning are not cognitive in nature. It is not that students cannot learn, it is that they do not wish to. Computers do not suffer from motivational problems, whereas human beings do.

This strikes me as very true and it reminds me of Dickens’ character, the school-teacher Gradgrind, whose educational theory was that children were empty buckets waiting to be filled with facts!

if educators invested a fraction of the energy on stimulating the students’ enjoyment of learning that they now spend in trying to transmit information we could achieve much better results.

How many of your learning experiences have been fun ones? I’ll bet that the fun ones stuck and the boring ones disappeared.

He concludes –

There are two main ways that children’s motivation to learn can be enhanced. The first is by a realistic reassessment of the extrinsic rewards attendant to education. This would involve a much clearer communication of the advantages and disadvantages one might expect as a result of being able to read, write, and do sums. Of course, these consequences must be real, and not just a matter of educational propaganda. Hypocrisy is easy to detect, and nothing turns motivation off more effectively than the realization that one has been had.

The second way to enhance motivation is to make children aware of how much fun learning can be. This strategy is preferable on many counts. In the first place, it is something teachers can do something about. Second, it should be easier to implement-it does not require expensive technology, although it does require sensitivity and intelligence, which might be harder to come by than the fruits of technology. Third, it is a more efficient and permanent way to empower children with the tools of knowledge. And finally, this strategy is preferable because it adds immensely to the enjoyment learners will take in the use of their abilities, and hence it improves the quality of their lives.

I’m sure he’s right. Check out the full article. It’s short but worth reading and although his focus on helping children to learn, the exact same principles apply to grown ups!

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Improving health by aiming at something else….

Posted in education, from the consulting room, from the living room, health, life, science, Uncategorized on October 18, 2007| 1 Comment »

 Now, here’s an interesting study. It’ll soon be published in the November issue of the American Journal of Public Health. There’s a way of considering the amount of health benefit from an intervention. It’s to assess the number quality-adjusted life-year gains per dollar invested. That is, not just benefits in terms of greater life expectancy, but also a measure of quality of life in those years. It’s a cost benefit analysis so the economic payoff is measured by assessing how much the intervention costs so you can work out how much it would cost to get the benefit of the better, longer lives. These researchers claim to have found an intervention which brings greater payoffs in these terms than most other interventions. What amazing new drug is this? Or is it a life-style change?

Nope.

You’re going to be surprised.  It’s reducing class sizes at school!

The class size reduction was from 22 – 25 kids per class, down to 13 – 17. From kindergarten through to Grade 3. The better education, produced better educational outcomes leading to better, less hazardous jobs and the ability to move out of poorer housing etc. I won’t bother you with the details of the figures here (you can follow the link and read more yourself if you like). But what I think makes this study especially fascinating is thinking out of the box.

These days we hear endless claims for technological fixes – from wonder drugs, to vaccines, to new claims for possible genetic engineering. But, historically, the greatest improvements in the health of populations do not come from medical interventions, they come from things like improving water supplies, sanitation, reducing overcrowding and so on. There’s been an enormous movement towards looking at smaller and smaller parts over the last couple of hundred years – reductionism. In the future we’ll see the greatest health gains by focusing holistically, considering the environments and contexts in which individuals are embedded and studying what happens within these systems instead of exclusively studying what happens at molecular levels.

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How we cope – learning from the movies. Part 4

Posted in education, from the consulting room, from the viewing room, health, life, movies, narrative on October 5, 2007| Leave a Comment »

We all cope in different ways. In this series we’re looking at ways of coping in parts 3, 4 and 5. In part 3 we looked at the activist way of coping.

Now let’s consider control as a strategy. The world can be a very scary place. For many people the events that occur in their lives face them with overwhelming uncertainty and doubt. If we feel the world is scary and dangerous and random, one way to cope with this reality is to shrink daily life into containable, controllable pieces. People do this to try and reduce the uncertainty and randomness in their experience. They do this by introducing routines, habits and rituals. They do this by either trying to control their physical environment – cleaning and ordering – and/or by trying to control the people in their lives. Watch the following three clips to see what this is like if we take it too far!

I’ll consider the third strategy – withdrawal – in final part – Part 5.

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How we cope – learning from the movies. Part 3

Posted in education, from the consulting room, from the viewing room, health, life, movies, narrative on October 4, 2007| 1 Comment »

One aspect of understanding someone is listen to their story and hear what they talk about – material, physical, practical issues? emotional and relationship issues? or spiritual issues of meaning and purpose? Another aspect is to find out what kind of ideas they have about themselves in relation to others – in particular to explore to what extent they see themselves as connected to, and identifying with, others, and to what extent they see themselves as separate and independant. I’ve explored this latter aspect in Parts 1 and 2.

But another key issue for all of us is how we cope in the face of challenges, and how we adapt to change. Just as I have a map of body, mind and spirit in consideration of the kind of world a person lives in, so I have a map of coping strategies, and again there are three – action; control and withdrawal. Let me reiterate that this is a dynamic map and whilst some people almost always seem to default to the same strategy, most of us are more flexible and use each and all of these strategies to different degrees.

Let’s explore to activist – the person who when faced with a problem or a challenge, rolls up their sleeves and gets stuck into it –

You can see it takes a certain self-belief to be able to cope with challenges this way!

We’ll have a look at control as a strategy in Part 4

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How we cope – learning from the movies. Part 2

Posted in education, from the consulting room, health, life, movies on October 3, 2007| Leave a Comment »

This is Part 2 in a series. You’ll find Part 1 here.

One of the major ways of creating a sense of self is through group identity. We see this especially strongly in small towns and villages where there are very real, very active communities. What I mean by that is not just people who live in the same street or same town but people who work together, play together, live together. Communities of people who share values and traditions which bond them together. I gave an example of such a community in the Part 1 of this series where I showed a clip about Hobbits. Well, hobbits are, of course, imaginary creatures, and some people find it hard to identify with fantasy so here are two clips from a movie entitled “Brassed Off”. This is an at times funny, at times tragic tale of a mining community in the north of England. It’s set in the Thatcher years when the coal mines were being closed down and these communities were being destroyed. A characteristic of these northern towns was the brass band. It was just one of the ways the community bonded. Mining towns would regularly have brass band contests – like this –

You can feel the spirit of these people and how the music, the beer and the comraderie created a cohesive, group identity.

The band leader is called Danny and in one scene he has a heart attack and as he lies, seemingly dying, in his hospital bed his band gather outside and pay their respects, by playing “Danny Boy”

Oops! I should’ve warned you to have your tissues ready! Moving, isn’t it? It’s probably the only time a brass band has moved me to tears!

Think back to the character we saw at the start of About a Boy. Can you imagine that he would have the same needs, the same desires and the same experience as these characters in this tale?

We are all different in so many ways and, in health care, to find the best treatment for someone, we have to discover who this person is who has this particular disease. Otherwise we’re probably going to fail to help them to recover.

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