Dr. Southwick’s
“Spare me the PowerPoint and bring back the medical textbook” is provocative publication
that broaches the important debate of how to most effectively teach medicine.
PowerPoint has clearly become the most popular and predominant mode of
post-secondary education. There are many potential reasons for this. For one,
the PowerPoint is probably the easiest method for mass transmission of pure
information: it replaced chalkboards or overhead slides because,
without having to recopy text or switch slides, this vastly increases the tempo
of information dissemination. PowerPoint also has an impressive host of
functionalities for incorporating images, transitions, and movies, which eclipses
all its predecessors. And now, more importantly it has become the convention,
the expected method of teaching, such that to do anything but would probably
raise a few eyebrows.
While knowledge is
an important aspect of education, operationalizing information is the crux of
medical education. For example, not only do we need to know what diabetes is,
how it can present, and ideas about management, we also need to actually be
able to identify the patient with a new presentation of diabetes, think about
what a diagnosis of diabetes means with for a patient in the context of
separate issues like hypertension, and develop an individualized management
plan. To do all this requires practice and knowledge integration, aspects that
we perhaps don’t emphasize enough in pre-clerkship.
Dr. Southwick’s
recommendation of bringing back the textbook is interesting because it is a
point that I have talked to others students about and we were nostalgic about
the times when learning emphasized textbooks. Textbooks provided a much more
satisfying form of learning. Most of us have probably experienced the
frustration of not understanding what a point in a slide meant because the point-form
structure had taken the idea completely out of context and robbed it of the
clarity of linguistic structure. PowerPoint is truly powered for HIGHLIGHTING
ideas – points – and not to convey complexity holistically.
This publication
also brings up the concepts of Just-in-Time Teaching and Peer Instruction, as
useful teaching tools. It also outlined 7 basic principles of teaching that I
personally thought would be quite useful to keep in mind:
1.
“encourage
contact between students and faculty
2.
develop
reciprocity and cooperation between students
3.
use
active learning techniques
4.
provide
prompt feedback
5.
emphasize
time on task
6.
communicate
high expectations
7.
respect
diverse talents and ways of thinking”
Food for thought: how
do we strike the balance between knowing a lot and knowing things well?
-Jenny
1. Southwick FS.
Spare me the PowerPoint and bring back the medical textbook. Transactions of
the American Clinical and Climatological Association 2007;118:115-122. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/pubmed?term=spare%20me%20the%20powerpoint
Dr. Southwick’s
“Spare me the PowerPoint and bring back the medical textbook” is provocative publication
that broaches the important debate of how to most effectively teach medicine.
PowerPoint has clearly become the most popular and predominant mode of
post-secondary education. There are many potential reasons for this. For one,
the PowerPoint is probably the easiest method for mass transmission of pure
information: it replaced chalkboards or overhead slides because,
without having to recopy text or switch slides, this vastly increases the tempo
of information dissemination. PowerPoint also has an impressive host of
functionalities for incorporating images, transitions, and movies, which eclipses
all its predecessors. And now, more importantly it has become the convention,
the expected method of teaching, such that to do anything but would probably
raise a few eyebrows. 
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