From The Educational Trenches A personal statement as to why and what

By Rob Houtepen (HES)

Rob responsible for the program in clinical ethics and health law in year 3, 4 and 5 of the Maastricht Medical School (r.houtepen@mastrichtuniversity.nl).

‘Practice what your preach’ were the first words of my first contribution to this website. Well, that’s all nice for others, but I prefer preaching about my own practice. After more than 10 very intensive years as an initial outsider in medical education, I feel a need to collect my thoughts in public. I’m afraid it will already take several articles to clarify what I’m on about. I intend to publish those in Dutch, but I hope writing a regular blog will help to organize my thoughts.

The subject of this blog is teaching ethical reflection in a problem based learning group, since my experience mainly derives from that practice. It’s not really intended to be self advertisement. In fact, it coincides with the results of an analysis of the evaluation forms of a number of those groups. These showed that, on average, I got slightly lower scores than my colleagues in the program that I’m responsible for. A bit puzzling and worrying, but then again, I’m the norm (if only because of the large number of groups that I do and my responsibility for the format) and I sincerely congratulate all my colleagues in performing above the norm. So I’m just the most experienced, not necessarily the best. And I can assure you that the program I’m responsible for will never attain a high score in student evaluations. So I guess I’m the weakest link trying to think through this weakness.

It’s all meant to be serious stuff, though, and the first installment is one hundred percent academic and dry. But from then on a peculiar penchant for heavy handed irony and low comedy ought to enlighten my texts. The program is outlined below, but I can definitely promise that it will not be followed in that particular order or even with those particular subjects and titles. It just gives you a clue what I’m on about. An excellent way to prevent me from putting all of this into practice is to react to the content: I’d like to be on a collaborative adventure here.

I: It’s about habit formation

II: Ethical theory and educational practice

III: In between different professions

IV: Practice, norms, rules and values

V: The core values of medicine

VI: The three goals of academic thinking education

VII: The habit of critical thinking

VIII: SMILEE, an educational philosophy

IX: GRGE (HE&HL): reflections on a format

X: Diversity and the elusive patient

XI: Slow Ethics

XII: The role of the ethics teacher in a problem based discussion group

XIII: What should assessment in an ethics program look like?

XIV: Medicine as a practice: what should that mean?

XV: Learning from discussion and deliberation

XVI: The legal model as a paradigm for the medical model of decision making

XVII: On the importance of reading reflective books

XVIII: Having a laugh with student evaluations in numbers