Tips for clinician educators – practice your talks

This week I will give a talk on acid base and electrolyte disorders.  I teach these subjects regularly, yet designing this talk has challenged my skills.  My problem is the curse of knowledge. The problem is that once we know something—say, the melody of a song—we find it hard to imagine not knowing it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. We have difficulty sharing it with others, because we can’t readily re-create their state of mind. At the board in morning report I have learned to “show my work”.  I give the learners plenty of opportunities to ask questions if I become obtuse.  But in designing a talk, I have to anticipate the problems. So I become the anti Allen Iverson.  I practice.   I first practice 3 weeks previously and got some very good suggestions. Then again a practiced with different colleagues who pointed out all the assumptions that I should not make in designing the talk.  I sent them an email today: Thanks greatly for helping me improve my talk. Practice, especially for talks like this one, always help us improve our delivery and help us get the message through to our learners. When we write our talks, especially if we feel like we have some expertise, we get trapped by the curse of knowledge I have redone the order of the cases, and hopefully fixed many errors. I did decide to leave out case #6 to allow more time for careful explication. If you have time to quickly peruse the slides, I would welcome any further comments. Again, thank...
Source: DB's Medical Rants - Category: Internal Medicine Authors: Tags: Attending Rounds Source Type: blogs