Given that universities have to be increasingly resourceful and creative in teaching health students to become competent practitioners, reflective self-assessment against validated tools appears to be a way to achieve this.
Dr. Chen also provides some competent (and fully referenced) academic discussions on how the medical profession stumbles in teaching empathy to students, but the real power of her book lies in her stories.
Experience is everything in teaching.
Over the past decade, there has been increased interest in teaching clinical reasoning during medical training in order to equip novice clinicians with the basic skills necessary to become competent diagnosticians.
Even for experienced and highly competent instructors, teaching in a SCALE-UP type classroom is a novel experience that requires new skills and support.
"We wanted to be able to select students, to charge tuition fees, to have excellent and competent professors, to teach in small groups and in decent working conditions," says Fritz Schaumann, its director.Five years after its foundation, the International University of Bremen has 500 students, who contribute just over €3.5m in fees.
The majority indicated that they feel confident and competent in their clinical teaching roles.
They were also competent in using interactive teaching methods and could ensure the participation of students in HIV/AIDS classes.
It is noteworthy that residents feel competent to teach while identifying a need for training in education.
But to wait for our public schools to be fixed before we can really make headway on improved outcomes isn't fair to the young people already in the pipeline who have not seen significant improvement in competent teaching, class size, or curriculum.
