From the 3/12/2021 newsletter
The Transformational Times First Anniversary "Best Essays"
These are the most read, most important, and most popular essays, poems, and reflections from our first year. They are all on the blog, so feel free to use the "SEARCH THIS BLOG" box in the right hand column to find and explore each of them.
From the 3/12/2021 newsletter
Editor’s Corner
The Transformational Times has a Birthday and I
have an Insight
Bruce H. Campbell, MD FACS
In this Anniversary Issue, we reprint some of the most important and popular essays published during the first year of the Transformational Times. Dr. Campbell, Editor in Chief of the newsletter, reflects back on its origins in March 2020 and believes it will offer a blueprint for the transformation of medical education and the culture of medicine for the coming generation …
This newsletter has been around for one year. Safe to say, more than a few things have changed over the months.
In March 2020, in-person classes were being cancelled, medical
students were being sent home from their clinical rotations, and the pandemic
was starting to become real. On March 16, Dr. Adina Kalet, Director the Kern
Institute, presented her vision for a weekly email that would offer support and
information to MCW and the wider community. She invited several of us to
address a variety of topics, asking us how we might:
We had no idea how to tackle Dr. Kalet’s challenge. On top of it, we all had day jobs and none of us had ever attempted to mount a weekly newsletter. Would we take on the challenge? Sure, we said. What could possibly go wrong?
So, the Transformational Times was born. That Monday meeting
led to a newsletter the following Friday. And every Friday since.
What we brought to the Transformational Times
We experimented. We learned. We pledged to keep the content relevant, surprising, honest, and edgy. We started this blog to archive many of the essays. Over the subsequent months, we expanded our efforts:
In the process, we aggressively began including the projects and missions of the Kern Institute. The institute’s thought leaders, program participants, and consultants shared insights on many topics, including visual thinking strategies, remediation, medical education transformation, entrepreneurial mindset, entrustable professional activities, educational measurement science, mentorship, mattering, practical wisdom, and professionalism.
Overwhelmingly busy people create our content, and we have
been gratified by their willingness to share stories on deadline. We are also very
grateful to our readers; of the 6000 who receive this email every Friday
morning, over 30% open one or more of the articles. We appreciate the feedback,
as well.
What the Transformational Times has taught me
Our MCW, Kern, and KNN world is remarkable. I now have even more respect for the accomplished and delightful people with whom we share this space. I have garnered new insights into the extra burden older, male, white folks like myself place on people who identify as “other.” I have been astonished by the maturity and skill of the youngest members of our community. I have seen how concepts such as mattering and the entrepreneurial mindset will soon change how medical educators approach everything they do.
Each week’s issue makes me wonder what will emerge from the ashes and chaos of the past year. The pandemic and social upheaval offer unique opportunities to innovate, lead the way, and develop new paradigms that can guide young adults from being premedical students through the phases of training to becoming character-rich, caring, and healthy practicing physicians and medical educators. By reading the Transformational Times, readers catch hints of what that change looks like.
The Kern Institute was established to “transform medical education.” This past year has transformed medical education and everything else in our worlds. Editing the newsletter has allowed me to glimpse a better path. If everything returns to the old, comfortable status quo when the masks come off, the classrooms and labs reopen, and the pandemic recedes, we will have lost.
Having read every single article over the past year, I should
have insight into all of the topics Dr. Kalet listed during our inaugural
meeting last March. And, of course, I do not. But, thanks to the amazing
opportunity that being editor has provided, I have learned much, become an
optimist, and have glimpsed the future.
A special thanks to all of our contributors! The
newsletter would not exist without the hard work of (drum roll…) Production
Editor Julia Schmitt and the rest of the editorial team: Kathlyn
Fletcher, MD MA, Adina Kalet, MD MPH, Wendy Peltier, MD, Michael Braun, PhD,
and medical students Olivia Davies, Scott Lamm, Eileen Peterson, Sarah Torres,
and Anna Visser. You are each amazing!
Bruce H. Campbell, MD FACS is a Professor in the Department of Otolaryngology and Communication Sciences and in the Institute for Health and Equity (Bioethics and Medical Humanities) at MCW. He is on the Faculty Pillar and is Editor in Chief of the Transformational Times newsletter for the Robert D. and Patricia E. Kern Institute for the Transformation of Medical Education.
From the 3/5/2021 newsletter
Perspective/Opinion
Setting the
Expectation for a Growth Mindset in KINETIC3’s Excellence in Teaching Track
by Alexandra
Harrington, MD
Dr. Harrington shares that character development in adults seems dependent on having a growth mindset, a frame of mind adopted by the Kern Institute's KINETIC3 Teaching Academy...
A growth mindset is defined by Dr. Carol Dweck as the belief that talents and skills can be developed in oneself and/or others. We have adopted this frame of mind in the KINETIC3 program and have set the expectation for having a growth mindset with respect to teaching in the Excellence in Teaching Track. Our learners are asked early in the program to reflect on previous teaching evaluations. We ask learners to share their positive evaluations and reflect on growth opportunities. Then, we ask learners to share any negative feedback on their teaching and again reflect on growth opportunities. We try to explore those opportunities, even if the negativity of the evaluation seems like Jimmy Kimmel’s mean tweets! KINETIC3 learners are given time to reflect substantively on their teaching and character strengths and opportunities for improvement and commit to working on those growth fronts during their coached teaching observations.
“We’re all a mixture . . . it’s true that you can have a fixed mindset in one area and a growth mindset in another and that it’s a spectrum, not a dichotomy,” Dr. Dweck tells us in a videoed interview that we watch in KINETIC3 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-71zdXCMU6A&feature=youtu.be).
Learners are asked to reflect and share stories wherein they had a fixed
mindset and then situations in which they have had growth mindsets. And as
Dr. Dweck advises, we ask learners to reflect on the triggers of the fixed
mindset. What puts you in the fixed mindset in that moment? The goal in this
exercise is to identify the trigger in hopes of avoiding the rigidity in the future.
We stretch our learners to mentor themselves hypothetically then towards a
growth-minded belief if they encounter similar scenarios in the future. Lastly,
we share examples of fixed and growth mindsets related to our previous
educational experiences, such as disregarding student evaluative feedback
(fixed) and trying a new active learning exercise (growth). It is imperative we
recognize that in the teacher-student relationship, our mindset may influence
our learners’ mindsets (and vice versa!).
Alexandra Harrington, MD, MT (ASCP), is a Professor of Pathology and Director of Hematopathology in the MCW Department of Pathology. She serves as Director of the Faculty Pillar and the KINETIC3 Teaching Academy within the Robert D. and Patricia E. Kern Institute for the Transformation of Medical Education.
From the 3/5/2021 newsletter
Perspective/Opinion
Entrepreneurially-Minded
Learning and Teaching: A Core Element of KINETIC3
by Bipin Thapa, MD
Dr. Thapa provides an
overview of what the KINETIC3 program hopes its participants will learn about
the Entrepreneurial Mindset …
Teachers and educators do different things, but how often do we stop to consider and “What is the value of what I am doing?” or “What exactly are we trying to create?”
We need to think differently if we are to address these questions.
In medicine and education, we shy away from terms like, “Entrepreneurship” because of the incorrect assumption that entrepreneurs focus solely on monetary profit. But entrepreneurship is more than that. It encompasses ways of creating anything of “value” – and can concentrate on things such as services, scholarships, processes, and quality improvements. It can even focus on experiences.
Academic Entrepreneurship creates sustained value in multiple dimensions that are financially and/or logically stable. It is competitive in the “marketplace”; the “market” here reflects a broader platform that includes, but is not limited to, scientific and peer-reviewed venues. Entering this market requires an Entrepreneurial Mindset (EM). EM is, in essence, a collection of mental habits like attentiveness toward opportunities, focus on their impact, and intent to create value. This learned set of values offers a way of thinking about the world and acting upon what we see. EM empowers the practitioner to question, adapt, think differently, and make positive change; it equips one to identify opportunities and create value in any context.
By building on work borrowed from our Kern Engineering Entrepreneurial Network (KEEN) colleagues, we are deliberately creating an entrepreneurially minded learning and teaching culture in the KINETIC3 program. Our teachers and educators start from the big ideas of why our learners need to learn something and then move to what they need to ask to answer the more important questions. We push them to discern how best they can accomplish the goals. We want them to focus on learning objectives that reflect the tandems of mindset and skillset. That is another offer of value. Our instructional methods must be inclusive and respectful of the differing learning styles of our learners; this is critical to excite every learner. Finally, our assessment methods must be practice-relevant, as we know that assessment drives learning.
The diagram shows the big picture of how the Entrepreneurial Mindset guides the process from identifying big picture themes through instruction to assessment.
We believe that by training entrepreneurially minded faculty, we will promote long term institutional change. Having a significant number of KINETIC3 alumni teaching students and residents with techniques built on the Entrepreneurial Mindset, can lead to “good” disruption and new ways of developing identity formation.
Bipin Thapa, MD, MS, FACP, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine (General Internal Medicine) and Assistant Dean of the Clinical Science Curriculum at MCW. He is a member of the Faculty Pillar and of the KINETIC3 Steering Committee of the Robert D. and Patricia E. Kern Institute for the Transformation of Medical Education.