Inadequate teaching during rotations at my fancy school?!?

[kattyboomboom]

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During M3, I have felt like over and over, we're not getting enough teaching. As in, little group teaching and almost no interaction with staff and even residents sometimes--no pimping, no 5 minute learning, nothing...more often than not.

I went through an entire month of internal with a total of 6 hours of group teaching and virtually no interaction with staff or residents. I got asked a differential once. When I asked the resident to at the very least ask me some questions, she did a 20 minute teaching in the 3rd week and that was it.

The same sort of thing happened during 2 months of psych. Probably 1 hour total of teaching with my staff after being with her for 8 weeks (and we had no residents!). The kicker here was that after 8 weeks with an attending, my entire evaluation was ONE incomplete sentence and a couple of checked boxes.

In general, it seems like my "prestigious" school does not enforce a minimum amount of teaching time with students. What's more, our evaluations also seem way too short. Without really being taught or properly evaluated, I'm wondering what I'm paying for?

Is this normal or am I actually receiving inadequate teaching and evals?

 

[SLUser11]

Is this normal or am I actually receiving inadequate teaching and evals?

It is both normal and inadequate. Unfortunately, the quality of clinical teaching is variable between schools, and isn't always great at random Ivy league school and poor at State U. Teaching is even more variable between different residents and attendings at the same school.

Having interacted with and worked with students and residents from several state schools, as well as fancy top tier schools, there is a definite disparity of clinical talent, and it's not angled in the direction you would think.

There isn't much you can do about it, unfortunately, so I recommend taking a front seat role in your medical education: Lots of reading, all the time. You may have to be more proactive with your residents as well, although this can backfire and cause a poor eval.....you gotta do what you gotta do to learn how to be a good doctor.

 

[DarthNeurology]

During M3, I have felt like over and over, we're not getting enough teaching.

In general, it seems like my "prestigious" school does not enforce a minimum amount of teaching time with students.

,

I know a couple schools in the northeast where basically they have/had a prestigious reputation and have pretty much let their educational system slide, i.e. no teaching as you described, a lot of busy work, and attendings don't take time to properly evaluate students and give feedback.

I would agree with above that you need to do a lot of reading on your own, and you should be doing this anyway regardless of the level of teaching you are receiving. It does make for a bad third/fourth year when nobody at your school cares about teaching.

 

[BigRedBeta]

Is this normal or am I actually receiving inadequate teaching and evals?

I'd say fairly normal for evals most of mine seemed to have about 30 seconds of thought put into them...but your teaching is definitely much, much different than what occurs at my school or the few other schools I have friends at. With the exception of our family medicine clerkship (which is an 8 week rural "immersion" type experience), even on our poor teaching clerkships there was some sort of weekly lecture series. Our best teaching came on Medicine where we had an hour long lecture every day for 12 weeks, plus our 3 weeks on outpatient clinic portion of the clerkship, you either had morning or afternoon clinic and the other half of the day was spent doing cases in small group, kind of a PBL on steroids that was very heavily clinically oriented.

I think resident teaching is always very hit or miss - not everyone likes to teach, some kind of expect the student to ask questions, or they just don't feel like they have the time.