Doug Lemov's field notes

I’m in the Palmetto state today… talking with medical faculty at the Greenville Hospital System in Greenville South Carolina. Last night I chatted with J. Michael Fuller, the Vice Chairman for Faculty Development and Education in the Department of Medicine here and found myself pretty impressed by the things Dr. Fuller does with his teachers. Not without some anxiety as well. Here’s why:

We were discussing the importance of Wait Time and Dr. Fuller described how he had run a small empirical test with some of his new teaching faculty. Concerned that medical faculty, like most teachers, typically wait less than a second after asking a question before taking and answer, he asked his new faculty members to teach something interesting and informal to a group of volunteer medical school students. He taped them. And he measured their wait time (it was about a second). He also measured the number of words students used in answering questions. And he coded the questions and their answers according to Bloom’s Taxonomy.

Then he discussed the importance of Wait Time with his teachers and offered training. And then he re-taped and re-measured. He found that wait time went up to about 3.5 seconds. And the number of words in a typical student answer tripled. And answers were more likely to be higher on Bloom’s Taxonomy. Pretty incredible stuff in terms of intentionality, empiricism, and the focus on the craft of teaching. What amazing data gathering and training.

So what’s to stew about? Well, it’s hard not to wonder about Dr. Fuller’s respect for and investment in the craft of teaching, his use of data to drive results, in light of what we do in the teaching profession more broadly. Do schools of education do this with their faculties (or students)? Do schools and districts do this? Medical educators, I am happy to say–as a consumer of the work of medical students-become-doctors–take the nuts and bolts craft of teaching part of their work as seriously as the medical part, at least if Greenville Hospital System is any indication. It reminded me of the intentionality about teaching among the faculty at my Business School… teachers discussed their methods, videotaped themselves, gathered data, developed shared teaching notes.

I wonder if the teaching profession sometimes more interested in reflections on teaching–what it means, how it’s judged, what it’s philosophies are–than the nuts and bolts craft of teaching. If you walked across the street from the Medical School to the School of Education would you see the same rigorous approach to the craft???

Greenville Hospital Medical System, J. Michael Fuller, Medical Education