In line with our prior two months of voting, we are back again to ask for your help in choosing which two articles from the June Annals of EM issue will be open access. Take a look at the article abstracts accepted for publication in June’s issue. Vote on your top two choices over the next 4 days, and the top two will be made open after the June issue of Annals of Emergency Medicine goes online.
Why do we do what we do?
This is the question at the heart of this month’s ALiEM Book Club selection. Drive 1 , by author Daniel Pink, discusses the history of motivational theory before provocatively making the case that we’re doing it wrong. He argues that having met our base desires (food, drink, sex), a reliance on extrinsic motivators (reward and punishment) will stifle intrinsic motivation and prevent us from functioning at our highest capacity. The three features described for optimizing intrinsic motivation are:
We make decisions every day, all day long. Sometimes we are aware of it and sometimes we are not. Our decision process is affected by many factors. Some are under our conscious control while others are not. In order to sharpen our decision process, we gain knowledge, practice, and then reflect. We are selective and gain knowledge from different sources, practice in the appropriate setting, and reflect alone or with others for feedback. It is important to explore all possible clinical reasoning pathways as we don’t know which process will get us in the right path.
As you are aware there has been lots of discussion going on about the concept of flipping the classroom in education these days. ALiEM recently hosted a book club where Salman Khan’s book (The One World School House: Education Reimagined) was featured in a Google Hangout. Khan, an ex-hedge fund manager, started making videos to help his niece with her math homework years ago. These videos ended up on YouTube and became quite popular. It wasn’t until later with the help of Bill Gates that he formed The Khan Academy and popularized the concept of the flipped classroom.
It was a few months into my simulation fellowship and I had been devoting a lot of my time to teaching at the medical school. I loved it. I find few things as fun as teaching students who are super motivated to learn. That got me thinking about why learning isn’t always that way. What is it about certain settings that foster a student’s passion to learn while others, that may be presenting the exact same content, cause the same group of students to grumble and disengage?
The Case of the Terrible Teammate presented a conflict between a team of chief residents. Sarah got upset because David seemed to be shirking his responsibilities and getting her to do all of the work. While we provided a specific context for the case, interpersonal disagreements over the distribution of work may come up in any work arrangement that splits responsibility between two or more parties. When it does, how should we deal with it? This month Dr. Teresa Chan (@TChanMD) and I (@Brent_Thoma) explored this issue with insights from the ALiEM community and 3 experts.
Thought simulation is only for doctors and nurses? Think again! More and more, people are reconsidering the notion that medical simulation has only application in the clinical setting. By rethinking the narrow mind set, educators are learning that simulation can be used almost anywhere for anyone! Even to teach sexual health to teenagers!