Medical school

Medical students are skipping class in droves — and making lectures increasingly obsolete

By Orly Nadell Farber 

The future doctors of America cut class. Not to gossip in the bathroom or flirt behind the bleachers. They skip to learn — at twice the speed.

Some medical students follow along with class remotely, watching sped-up recordings of their professors at home, in their pajamas. Others rarely tune in. At one school, attendance is so bad that a Nobel laureate recently lectured to mostly empty seats.

Nationally, nearly one-quarter of second-year medical students reported last year that they “almost never” attended class during their first two, preclinical years, a 5 percent increase from 2015.

The AWOL students highlight increasing dissatisfaction and anxiety that there’s a mismatch between what they’re taught in class during those years and what they’re expected to know — or how they’re tested — on national licensing exams. Despite paying nearly $60,000 a year in tuition, medical students are turning to unsanctioned online resources to prepare for Step 1, the make-or-break test typically taken at the end of the preclinical years.

These self-guided med students are akin to a group of American tourists wandering through Tokyo without a map. Like a tour guide hired on the street, the online learning tools — including memory aids, videos, and online quizzes — can enhance the educational journey, or send the students down a dead end.

Lawrence Wang, a third-year M.D.-Ph.D. student at the University of California, San Diego, and the National Institutes of Health, said he relied heavily on these resources during his first two years of medical school.

“There were times that I didn’t go to a single class, and then I’d get to the actual exam and it would be my first time seeing the professor,” he said. “Especially, when Step was coming up, I pretty much completely focused on studying outside materials.”

Wang isn’t alone. According to 2017 data from the Association for American Medical Colleges, 1 in 4 preclinical students watches educational videos — like those on YouTube — on a daily basis. And according to two video developers, tens of thousands of medical students subscribe to their products — one of which costs $250 for two years, the other $370 for one year.

Leaders in medical education have begun to scramble. Some medical schools, like Harvard, have done away with lectures for the most part. Instead of spending hours in an auditorium, Harvard students learn the course content at home and then apply the knowledge in mandatory small group sessions.

Other institutions, like Johns Hopkins, are moving in the same direction, but have yet to make a full switch. Hopkins cut down on lectures and boosted sessions that require active student participation. Preclinical lecture attendance hovers around 30 to 40 percent, according to Dr. Nancy Hueppchen, associate dean for curriculum.

For many students, she said, licensing exam prep begins on day one of medical school: “They have this parallel curriculum going along with what we’re teaching them.”

Step 1, an eight-hour multiple choice test, is a big deal. Performance on the exam, though it’s taken before most students even begin training in a hospital, heavily influences which medical specialties they can eventually pursue after school and at what hospitals they can pursue them.

With medical schools grading pass-fail, the Step 1 score is an increasingly significant piece of information that’s used to sort through residency applications, Hueppchen said. When she took the exam, it was only used as a pass-fail test. Today, residency programs rely on the score more heavily; students and faculty suspect that it’s used as a cutoff for making admissions decisions.

Ryan Carlson, a third-year M.D.-Ph.D. student at the University of Washington, said that his school focused on teaching “what they thought was important for a physician to know.” But medical students have to know more than what is relevant to a practicing clinician to succeed on Step. The exam focuses on rare diseases and other minutiae, said Carlson, who now tutors for the test.

Hueppchen acknowledged that students at Hopkins and elsewhere “express some distrust that they’re getting everything they need — or that we’re being meticulous in pointing out what they need — to study for and excel on the Step 1 exam.”

SketchyMedical produces visual memory aids with elaborate illustrations, like this one of the major drugs targeting the sympathetic nervous system. Stephen Wang at SketchyMedical

 

The medical tour guides

That distrust has spawned a cottage industry of online study aids. Most are a far cry from your high school SAT prep course.

SketchyMedical is one of the most popular guides. The company, built in 2013 by three then-medical students at the University of California, Irvine, produces visual memory aids with elaborate illustrations to help students learn and retain the voluminous material they’re expected to know.

Dr. Andrew Berg and his co-founders, Drs. Saud Siddiqui and Bryan Lemieux, started sketching pictures and pairing them with stories while taking microbiology in their second year of medical school.

“We were just bombarded with different names of bacteria, viruses, and fungi, and we were having a tough time keeping them all straight,” he said.

The sketches helped them, and now other students are using them, too.

Imagine it’s test day and a med student is asked which drug she would use to treat a patient’s postoperative gastrointestinal blockage. The student closes her eyes and mentally enters the world of “Acetyl-Cola,” a bustling port town that’s depicted in one of SketchyMedical’s cartoons. Outside a storefront, the student finds construction workers, motorcyclists wearing brain-shaped helmets, piles of dripping-wet fish, and a man sporting an adrenal gland-shaped beanie.

A colon-shaped mixing truck pouring out cement is an unfortunate, but effective, symbol for defecation, and a worker wearing a name tag reading “Beth” and drinking a cola reminds the student of the drug bethanechol, given to treat intestinal obstructions.

The illustrations are turned into narrated videos, which teach drug names and their mechanisms and side effects. SketchyMedical has also produced videos on microbiology and pathology.

Berg compares the work of Sketchy to hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt. But for many, Sketchy evokes a different technique used a thousand years later in ancient Greece: method of loci, also called a memory palace or journey.

Memory palaces are typically imagined spaces in which a person can store information like a string of numbers or a series of words. Each piece of information is placed somewhere inside the palace. When the palace builder wants to recall an item, she can take a mental stroll through the space to retrieve it. This technique famously enabled Cicero, the Roman statesman and philosopher, to commit his speeches to memory.

“We accidentally stumbled upon these visual learning techniques, but now looking back we see there’s a lot of evidence supporting visual learning,” Berg said.

“That was the biggest learning curve of med school — it wasn’t so much how do I do well in it, it was, how do I use all these crazy resources that are being marketed to me to best meet my goal of passing Step.”

Ryan Carlson, third-year M.D.-Ph.D. student at the University of Washington

SketchyMedical is not the only extracurricular resource students rely on. An entire industry cropped up in the last few years, marketing videos and self-quizzing features to preclinical students. Dr. Jason Ryan, the creator of Boards and Beyond, is a name (and voice) familiar to medical students across the country.

Ryan, a faculty member at University of Connecticut School of Medicine, creates explanatory videos that track along with the content in First Aid, a Step preparatory book that Ryan said is more like “an encyclopedia of terms” than a real study aid. Ask any medical student if they use First Aid, and they’ll point you to their heavily annotated, tattered copy.

While both Ryan and Berg consider their products supplements to regular medical education, many students view them as necessary investments for success. Choosing which ones to use can be a challenge, however.

“That was the biggest learning curve of med school — it wasn’t so much how do I do well in it, it was, how do I use all these crazy resources that are being marketed to me to best meet my goal of passing Step,” Carlson said.

 

The old players react

This expanding corner of the medical education industry is both a product of a new attitude among students — born from anxiety surrounding exam prep — and a disrupter of the traditional classroom education. Med schools now have to think more creatively about how they train their future doctors, Berg said.

In 2015, Harvard Medical School revamped its curriculum for the first two years to enable clinical exposure and boost class attendance with a flipped-classroom model: Students learn the content at home, and then apply it during in-class exercises. Dr. Richard Schwartzstein, director of education scholarship, said the program now emphasizes problem-solving and critical thinking — skills seen as essential to practicing medicine — instead of factual recall.

But while medical schools are de-emphasizing pure memorization, the national licensing exams have yet to reconsider, he acknowledged. Still, Schwartzstein is not a huge fan of external resources, citing their focus on memorization and pattern recognition as major weaknesses.

“You don’t have to actually teach pattern recognition,” he said. “We all are born with the capability of recognizing pattern.” He advises students to stick to Harvard-developed videos and their recommended readings. Like many medical schools, Harvard gives students a dedicated study period — six to eight weeks without coursework — to “prepare in whatever way they deem most appropriate to take the boards,” he said.

Hueppchen said that the outside resources “may have value in day-to-day studying, they may have value in studying for Step 1,” but Hopkins has not vetted them so it doesn’t recommend them to students either.

The National Board of Medical Examiners, which works with state medical boards to set the minimum standards for medical licensing and administers the Step exam, also doesn’t endorse these products — or their use as hard lines for residency admissions, said Dr. Michael Barone, vice president of licensure programs. The group “is aware of some secondary uses of scores,” he said, but the test’s primary purpose is to report licensure alone.

So long as Step still requires intensive rote memorization, companies like SketchyMedical and Boards and Beyond will likely remain in business.

Both Berg and Ryan agree that physicians no longer need to memorize as much as they did in the past. Ryan’s grandmother was one of the first female physicians to graduate from her medical school in the 1940s. Back then, he said, she had to remember everything. “If she had to go to a book every time she saw a patient, she’d never be able to work through the day.”

Today, there’s much more to know, and medicine is evolving so rapidly — with new drugs, guidelines, and practices — that physicians can’t possibly remember it all. Instead, they look information up on their cellphones, using a variety of apps on the clinic floors. But preclinical students still need to commit board-tested material to memory, a task often compared to drinking from a firehose.

Needing to memorize for boards and learn in parallel for their institutions is the breeding ground for anxiety that Hueppchen said “has truly detracted from the joy of learning.” It has even detracted from the joy of teaching, she added.

Berg said he tries to bring joy to memorization: “I think that what I hope to contribute the most is making studying more fun.”

Lectures in Medical School

Saying Goodbye to Lectures in Medical School — Paradigm Shift or Passing Fad?

Richard M. Schwartzstein, M.D., and David H. Roberts, M.D.

N Engl J Med 2017; 377:605-607August 17, 2017DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1706474

“Become a doctor, no lectures required.”1 This headline about the University of Vermont’s proposed new approach to medical education generated considerable controversy. Although this proposed change is more drastic than the curriculum reform taking place at other medical schools, the movement away from traditional lecture-based courses has been under way in U.S. medical schools for more than three decades. Transformation began with the introduction of problem-based learning; more recently, lecture-based teaching has increasingly been replaced by team-based learning, interprofessional education, and exercises integrating clinical medicine and basic science. But are the newest proposed changes evidence-based, or are they merely the latest fad in medical education? Are all lectures to be avoided?
Most physicians today readily acknowledge that the biomedical information available exceeds what one person can learn and retain. Questions remain, however, regarding how much content students must learn, whether that learning is best done in traditional classroom settings, and what else is required for medical trainees to become successful lifelong learners and adaptable practitioners. The ubiquitous presence of personal and institutional technology permits rapid access to medical information and enables educators to focus on helping students develop a deeper understanding of human health and disease, problem-solving skills, and the ability to transfer knowledge learned in one context to another situation.2 Educators giving a traditional lecture with dozens of content-heavy PowerPoint slides may confuse what they teach with what students learn: the fact that a teacher has presented a piece of information does not mean that students have learned it. In fact, cognitive-load theory suggests that our brains are limited in the amount of information they can process at a time3; 60 slides in 45 minutes may seem like an efficient way to teach, but it is unlikely to be an effective way to learn.
Students learning new material may be deceived by the illusion of knowing and the fallacy of understanding.2 When students hear or read material that is fluent and well presented, it is common for them to believe they have now mastered the content. When confronted with a problem that requires application of that information, however, they may realize that their understanding is superficial at best.
To promote more thorough understanding and enhance problem-solving skills and self-directed learning — critical skills for a doctor who will be practicing for 30 to 50 years and, in the case of self-directed learning exercises, a new requirement for accreditation established by the Liaison Committee on Medical Education — medical schools have begun emphasizing active learning and team-based activities. Acquisition of information occurs largely outside the classroom: in accordance with principles derived from cognitive science, factual content is presented in study assignments that aren’t overwhelmingly long, and the content is interspersed with questions or problems to ensure that students can assess their level of understanding.
In the classroom, learning can be facilitated by the instructor, but it must be driven in large part by the student. Case vignettes are important for establishing the relevance of the material. Questions can be posed in a manner that requires retrieval of information, which solidifies memory but also compels students to view information from a new perspective and transfer it to the context of the given case. Instead of posing questions that begin with “what” (e.g., “What are the causes of hypotension?”), instructors can use “how” and “why” questions (e.g., “How do you think about blood pressure control?”; “Why would this patient be hypotensive under these conditions?”). Asking students to compare a new case or example with one they discussed the previous week further facilitates the transfer of knowledge.3 Questions for which there can be multiple right answers can be the most compelling because they encourage discourse and generation of contrasting hypotheses. Time must be allowed for students to work in groups to discuss thoughts, test ideas (both theirs and others), and begin to learn how to think like a doctor. These activities require more effort from students than it takes to memorize facts, but they are also more effective for learning and retaining knowledge.2
This so-called flipped classroom approach is well suited to students who are members of the millennial generation.4 These young adults are digital natives — they have grown up with technology and are intimately familiar with it. Raised to be part of teams, they thrive in collaborative environments. They are accustomed to finding information online and learn best from visually appealing content that keeps them engaged and is presented in short segments (such as videos that are less than 10 minutes long). The traditional lecture will quickly lose the attention of many of these students, and an unengaged student is not learning.
The early returns from this approach have been encouraging, particularly in college science courses and in the dozen or so medical schools that are implementing new curricula using these pedagogical methods (see photo)
Faculty and Students Interacting in Learning Studios at Harvard Medical School.). In a randomized, controlled trial comparing an early version of the flipped classroom with traditional problem-based learning tutorials, students found the alternative learning environment to be more engaging and thought-provoking.5 Students who had performed relatively poorly in prior courses had a statistically significant improvement in their exam scores — possibly because interacting with their peers and sharing their ideas prepared them better. Faculty using a flipped-classroom approach often feel liberated from the tyranny of the requirement to “cover” everything. Since acquisition of information is accomplished by the student outside class, interactions between teachers and students can focus on content that is difficult to understand and on the application of new concepts to real-world problems.
So is the lecture dead? If “lecture” refers to the traditional picture of a professor standing in front of and talking at a large group of students who are passively absorbing information, then yes, we believe medical schools should be largely abandoning that teaching format. But if it describes large-group interactive learning sessions with students who have prepared in advance, with frequent questions directed at the audience, time set aside for group discussion, and use of audience-response systems (to poll students on a question to assess for understanding, for example), then we believe an interactive lecture-style format should remain an option and can be an effective teaching tool.
As we look to the future of medical education, we believe it’s important to avoid zealotry with respect to pedagogical approaches, including the insistence that team-based learning methods must adhere to specific criteria or that no deviation from pure problem-based learning is allowed. We can often serve our students best by fusing elements of various methods, such as team-based or case-based learning and interactive large-group learning sessions, rather than feeling obliged to adhere to a particular format. But we must also use evidence-based approaches whenever possible and rigorously evaluate our innovations, acknowledging that important outcomes may include student engagement and problem-solving skills, team dynamics, and the learning environment as much as exam scores. In our daily lives as clinicians, we aim to create a culture of continuous quality improvement. We should strive to create the same culture in our educational lives.

References

1. 1
   Straumsheim C. Become a doctor, no lectures required. Inside Higher Ed. September 26, 2016 (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/09/26/u-vermont-medical-school-get-rid-all-lecture-courses).
2. 2
   Brown PC, Roediger HL III, McDaniel MA. Make it stick: the science of successful learning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014.
3. 3
   de Jong T. Cognitive load theory, educational research, and instructional design: some food for thought. Instr Sci 2010;38:105-134
   CrossRef | Web of Science
4. 4
   Roberts DH, Newman LR, Schwartzstein RM. Twelve tips for facilitating Millennials’ learning. Med Teach 2012;34:274-278
   CrossRef | Web of Science | Medline
5. 5
   Krupat E, Richards JB, Sullivan AM, Fleenor TJ Jr, Schwartzstein RM. Assessing the effectiveness of case-based collaborative learning via randomized controlled trial. Acad Med 2016;91:723-729
   CrossRef | Web of Science | Medline

Teaching practice

Student surveys are destroying my confidence, says new academic

I’m a new academic and I keep being told that my lectures are boring. Is this really the best way to develop as a teacher?

When I walked into a classroom to deliver my first lecture, early in 2014, I was terrified. Not long out of undergraduate studies myself, I felt like an imposter. Nervousness flooded every inch of my body and, once the lecture had finished, it immediately became a blur in my mind.

It took time for my confidence to grow but I slowly began to have more faith in my teaching. Engaged and responsive students fuelled my enthusiasm and boosted my self-esteem. As I began to understand classroom dynamics, I was able to adapt my lesson plans in response to a particular session or group rather than focusing my energy on making sure I got through every slide and remembered every point. Standing in front of a room of students began to feel normal.

But our mandatory student feedback surveys are crushing that confidence. They report that I seem “inexperienced” and the block that I teach is “uninteresting”.

The point about inexperience is accurate, of course; some of the staff I teach alongside have taught for 20 years, while I have taught for 20 hours (over two and a half years of PhD research). What’s more, those 20 hours have been passed my way in bits and pieces, spread across numerous courses and year groups, meaning that I rarely have long enough to learn student names or get used to a group dynamic. In terms of content, I have little control over what I teach and I am often called upon at the last minute, with little time to prepare.

I have always jumped at the opportunity to gain teaching experience. I know that it is essential if I am to secure an academic post after my PhD – otherwise I am unlikely to be even considered for roles that involve teaching. I also relish the opportunity to share my knowledge and enthusiasm for my subject. I want to inspire students in the same way that my lecturers inspired me.

Perhaps I’m just not cut out to teach. I have often asked myself this. But observations and feedback on my teaching practice from academics and fellow PhD researchers (from both within and outside of my discipline) have always been positive, encouraging and constructive. So what is happening with the student feedback?

Perhaps the issue is not with feedback from students, but with the way feedback is collected and used. I often teach on courses taught by up to five members of staff: each tutor teaches a segment of the course, which are all linked by a common theme. But the student feedback surveys do not take this fragmented structure into account. Instead, students are asked to respond to broad questions about the course as a whole: “What did you enjoy?” and “What could be improved?”.

I don’t blame the students for the negative feedback. In my department, these surveys are distributed in the final 10 minutes of a 50-minute lecture. I don’t think this set-up is conducive to thorough contemplation: they’re already eager to get away and may not be inclined to put in the effort to provide useful feedback.

Add to this the well-reported problem of gender bias in student evaluations and the value of these surveys disintegrates further. Are students reacting to the fact that I am a woman, as well as a young one?

Rather than encouraging young researchers to improve their practice, negative feedback from students at this very early stage can have a detrimental, demotivating effect. But as university students become consumers, more emphasis is placed on consumer responses and demands. So, rather than being guided through the early stages of teaching, PhD students are being exposed early on to the bruising student-consumer market.

Institutions should question how useful this feedback can really be to their long-term academic success. Perhaps student feedback is just a waste of everyone’s time – as well as putting PhD students off university teaching careers.

Eight-minute Lecture

The Eight-Minute Lecture Keeps Students Engaged

By Illysa Izenberg

In the 1970s, my mother, a fifth-grade teacher, would lament, “The TV remote has ruined my classroom! I can almost feel the kids trying to point a clicker at me to change the channel!” Little did she know that college students today don’t need to wish for a remote control to switch from their professor to entertainment—an endless assortment of distractions are all on their smart phones.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that students retain little of our lectures, and research on determining the “average attention span,” while varying, seems to congregate around eight to ten minutes (“Attention Span Statistics,” 2015), (Richardson, 2010). Research discussed in a 2009 Faculty Focus article by Maryellen Weimer questions the attention span research, while encouraging instructors to facilitate student focus.

When I began teaching in 2006, I assumed that students could read anything I say. Therefore, my classes consisted of debates of, activities building on, and direct application of theories taught in the readings—no lectures.

But I noticed that students had difficulty understanding the content in a way that enabled accurate and deep application without some framing from me. In short, I needed to lecture—at least a little. This is when I began the eight-minute lecture. If you’re worried that eight minutes is too long, I discovered that when students experience many short lectures throughout the semester, they learn to focus in those bursts, in part because they know the lecture will be brief. 

How to implement the eight-minute lecture

 
1. Prepare students – Early in the semester, explain your teaching methodology and your rationale for doing things a certain way. This helps manage students’ expectations. Most of my students study engineering and expect to mostly listen to lectures and take notes. They are less accustomed to an active learning environment that involves lots of debates on the readings, small group discussions and report-backs, short reflection papers, quick multiple choice clicker quizzes, problem sets, and/or short lectures. 

2. Redesign/rewrite lectures – Review your lectures to identify natural breaks. Where can you pause without losing meaning? How can you use students’ knowledge from their homework and previous learning as a scaffold? 

Next, look for areas in your lecture where you talk about something that instead can be learned from an image, video, or interactive activity, and substitute accordingly. Cull through the content until you have eliminated two-thirds of your lecture material.

An example from last semester

 
Toward the end of last semester, I began a module on global business. The learning objectives for the first 50-minute class period on the topic were to be able to discuss the origins and benefits/costs of globalization and to test global business theories against existing corporate outcomes. 

In preparation, students read a textbook chapter delineating the history and theories of success in global business, and completed either an interview with a manager working internationally or an analysis of global business news (their choice).

With this preparation, they came to class with a firm grasp of global business terminology and context. Further, as this class period came toward the end of the semester, students had a basic working knowledge of management and leadership theory; Western business history; and the interaction of business, government, and the global economy.

I started out by asking a question related to their preparation. I then began my first eight-minute lecture, introducing them to the concept of balance of payments while displaying current numbers up on the screen. Once I explained trade imbalances, I asked questions that weren’t answered in their reading or my lecture, but were answerable with careful reflection on both. 

For example, “How might you incorporate your previous learning on the supply and demand curve to understand how exchange rates influence global business?” 

Once this topic was fully explored, I gave another eight-minute lecture, and then engaged them in a new activity that taught the next learning objective. At the end of class, I tested to ensure that the objectives had been met by asking students for a one-to-three-sentence note card summarizing their learning. The success of this method of interspersing mini-lectures with activities, discussions, and time for reflection was validated by the final exam scores achieved by the students in this class, which surpassed those of previous semesters. 

References:
Statistics Brain Research Institute. “Attention Span Statistics.” April 2, 2015. Retrieved from http://www.statisticbrain.com/attention-span-statistics/.

Richardson, H. “Students only have ‘10-minute attention span’.” News.bbc.co.uk. January, 2010. Retrieved from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/8449307.stm.

Wilson, K. and Korn, J. H. “Attention during lectures: Beyond ten minutes.” Teaching of Psychology 34, no. 2 (2007): 85–89. 

* Illysa Izenberg is a lecturer for the Center for Leadership Education in the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins University.

Lectures

Getting the Most out of Guest Experts Who Speak to Your Class

By Randy Laist, PhD

Inviting guest speakers into your classroom is a classic teaching strategy. Welcoming other voices into the classroom provides students with access to other perspectives, adds variety to the classroom routine, and demonstrates that learning is a collaborative enterprise. At the same time, however, presentations by guest experts are often plagued by a variety of design flaws that hinder their educational effectiveness. Guest experts, being unfamiliar with the mastery level of the students in the class, may speak over the heads of the students, or they may present their material at a level that is inappropriately introductory. Because they are generally unfamiliar with the class curriculum, they may repeat information that the students have already learned, or their comments may not connect in any clear way with what the students already know and what they are currently learning. 

Miscommunication between the guest expert and the host professor, furthermore, may result in the guest’s presentation running either too short or, more commonly, too long. Despite these hurdles, the increasingly collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of higher education makes the kind of partnerships represented by guest-expert arrangements more important than ever. With a little extra preparation, professors can increase the likelihood of a productive guest expert experience.

Typically, professors may invest weeks of effort into scheduling a guest speaker, but less effort into arranging their classroom activities so that the speaker’s appearance will further the curricular objectives of the course. When professors invite guest experts into their classrooms, they tend to conceptualize the arrangement as a compartmentalized event that stands outside of the regular current of class activity. The block of time scheduled for the guest tends to represent a break from the class schedule, rather than an essential part of the course material. As a result, the guest’s contributions are not as impactful as they might be if steps were taken to ensure that some degree of alignment were achieved between the curriculum and the speaker. The following strategies may help professors optimize the value of guest experts whom they invite to address their students.

Communicate clearly with the guest about what the objectives of the class are, where the students are in the overall curriculum, and how the guest’s appearance in your class intersects with what the students are learning about that week. Encourage the guest expert to tailor her remarks toward specific learning goals that the students are actively pursuing. You might also consider providing your guest expert with a copy of your syllabus, as well as with a brief summary of presentations given by other guest experts who have addressed your class. 

Establish expectations about the length of time that the guest expert will speak. Do not ask a guest to stay for the entire class period. Experts should limit the lecture phase of their presentation to 30 minutes or less. Ideally, there should be time both before the guest’s presentation for the students to prepare to meet the guest, and then afterward for the students to discuss their observations and responses. 

Use the time before and after the guest’s appearance to establish connections between the guest’s area of expertise and the learning objectives of the class. Give students a specific task that encourages them to take notes while the guest expert talks (for example, compile a list of the three most interesting things the guest said). Have students research the guest expert’s background or area of expertise and prepare questions to ask of the speaker, particularly questions that relate the course content to the guest’s area of expertise. Always allow time for a class discussion in which the teacher and the students can develop ways of connecting what the guest has said to key concepts of the class. 

Encourage guest experts to teach, rather than simply to speak. Instead of asking them to simply talk about their area of expertise, ask them to speak with the students about what the students are learning. Guest lecturers ordinarily want to prepare comments, but their contributions to your class might actually more meaningful if they come simply expecting to respond to questions from the student and teacher. In addition to making the guest expert’s time in your class interactive and engaging, a more student-centered approach to the expert’s presentation will ensure that the guest expert is speaking directly to the concerns of the class. 

With the guest’s permission, videotape the presentation and make the recording available to the class. Compile electronic copies of any handouts, or ask for a copy of the guest’s PowerPoint presentation. Keeping a record of the guest’s appearance will make it possible for the class to continue to refer to the expert’s comments throughout the term, and it will allow future classes to benefit from the guest expert’s contribution as well. 

Professors who invite guest experts into their classrooms promote opportunities for creative new syntheses in an academic landscape too often characterized by disciplinary and professional silos. The simple guidelines outlined above can help professors engaged in this kind of work to ensure that their students are benefiting from these efforts.

Randy Laist, associate professor and curriculum director, Goodwin College