1. Michael L. Tuggy, MD Director, Swedish Family Medicine – First Hill
Learning in the Entertainment Age: Effective Teaching for the 21st Century
Michael L. Tuggy, MD
Director, Swedish Family Medicine – First Hill

2. What makes a great lecture?
Dynamic delivery
Entertaining content
Humor
New ideas that have POWER
Pizzazz, suspense

3. Does a “great lecture” work?
Think of a “great talk” you heard…
Can you remember anything specific?
Any total blanks?

4. How long are our attention spans?
Or in other words, how often do you need to change the stimuli to our brains to keep our attention?
10-15 minutes !

5. Self - Assessment
In the past year- have you given didactics where: (Y or N)
A resident falls asleep during your presentation?
A resident is texting to plan that evenings activities during your talk?
You ask a great question and you get a blank stare in return?
Residents complain that they had to work too much during your presentation?

6. 5. How good is our retention from traditional lectures?
10% on a warm day…
(and our didactics room is really cold!)

7. The Real Question?
How can we engage our learners actively in a way that allows them to retain and use what they are experiencing from your teaching?

8. Learning = retrievable memory and problem solving
Can we learn and be entertained at the same time?

9. How we learn and remember:
“The Brain Rules” – by John Medina, PhD.
Key points:
You have to engage with the content to get the conceptual understanding
You should use visual or hands on learning if possible - Visual tools are powerful. (6x)
Multi-sensory input and emotion enhance memory
You MUST use the right timing rules to remember (anything)

10. What we know about Timing, Memory and Retention
MUST repeat in some way at 30 seconds
MUST repeat again at minutes
Overnight activities (sleep cycle) – 1000 x autopilot
Morning review (boosts another 10%)
You can move from 10% up to 60% retention!!

11. Are the “Brain Rules” Important?
Lots of learning theory backed by studies.
What works actually makes sense to us as learners
What is hard about the Brain Rules is actually teaching that way

12. Bad Temptations
Give the learners all of the information you think they need
Too much focus on factual content vs. meaning/understanding of key concepts
Death by PowerPoint

13. Change… Your idea of what “lectures” look like
Think of the value of your teaching time- it is precious
Interactive Teaching Models can be applied to larger groups

14. A Harvard Experiment Prof. Eric Mazur- physicist
Great lectures, great feedback – but they weren’t learning core concepts
Changed to interactive model – marked increase in ability to answer conceptual understanding questions.

15. How is this different? Move from “Lecturer” to learning facilitator
Expect students to come prepared
Engage them with each other and directly with the material

16. What does this look like in practice?
Less slides
More case-based questions
More thought into WHAT the key learning points are (not just the facts)
Clear plan to summarize and coalesce the key learning points.

17. Let’s take a look…
Handout – case based teaching model

18. What makes it hard to teach this way?
Eyes off me – hands on the material
Attention span is a hard master to serve.
The problem with repetition…
seems repetitive
REPEAT

19. The Summary Step
Uses timed repetition that will begin the memory cycle
Gives you the chance to highlight salient learning point in the group discussion
Repeat the key learning points at about 60 minutes

20. So what did you just learn?
Effective teaching must actively engage learners
Using visual tools activates the brain ~6x more hearing or reading
Teach concepts more than facts using cases
Use the timing rules for memory to improve retention (30 sec, minutes, AM Review).
Summarize clearly at the end of presentation to hammer home the key learning objectives.

21. Questions?