Content area
Full Text
Educational perspectives can be useful guides to our teaching in psychiatry. Nevertheless, formal training about teaching in psychiatry is uncommon and rarely includes the study of educational perspectives or theory that underlies teaching. Using a modified case-based format, the authors present three different critiques of a hypothetical faculty member who teaches from a behavioral learning perspective. Feedback from faculty with cognitive, social learning, and interpersonal-inspiration perspectives is provided. The value and application of understanding educational perspectives in teaching is discussed. (Academic Psychiatry 2002; 26:61-69)
Few physicians involved in medical education have had formal training in teaching or in the educational concepts that underlie pedagogical methods. And yet we develop a teaching style, give lectures, conduct courses, and facilitate small groups. Many of us attend faculty development teaching workshops, but these usually focus on specific pedagogic skills and do not emphasize evaluation of different educational theories or the development of a coherent educational perspective (1). We have initiated, facilitated, or weathered curriculum reform-a process that may call for a shift in educational perspective or theoretical orientation even when it is experienced as simply a change in learning objectives and teaching methodology.
Without formal training, we are overly reliant on other sources for our thinking about medical education. For many of us, our educational perspective may be determined by a set of undiscussed, experientially derived, aggregated beliefs and ideals about the nature of teaching and learning. We teach as best we can, often with success, but find it difficult to describe clearly how or why we teach the way we do.
Improved understanding of educational perspectives can facilitate discussions about teaching, clarify the intent of pedagogical techniques, stimulate our thinking, and enliven the daily experience of teaching. Additionally, in teaching medical trainees to become the lifelong learners that the practice of medicine demands, we teach them (explicitly or implicitly) about learning itself (2). If we as teachers are unclear about what learning is and how teaching happens, it may be harder for our students to develop efficient patterns for lifelong learning that the practice of medicine demands.
In this paper, we present a hypothetical case to demonstrate different educational perspectives and how they might differently influence the daily practice of teaching. Dr. Doe, a junior...