Instructional Strategies and Sequencing

Introduction

Medical education, guided through a philosophy of modern science, has continuously re-analyzed the scientific explanation process to help communicate its social purpose (Tang, 2015) by: (a) reporting information through an organized classification, description, or comparison approach, (b) explaining processes and underlying causes, (c) experimental reporting through presented methodology, results, and discussion, and (d) argument of evidence to support a claim or position. The changing dynamics of medicine is not lost on medical educators, who establish and re-establish educational goals to align with evidence-based medicine practice expectations of modern society.

Established medical educational goals might vary from one U.S. medical college to another, but there are over-arching commonalities. Common goals include (The University of Kentucky College of Medicine, 2016):

• 1.

  Providing patient care through demonstration of knowledge, skills and attitudes to effectively evaluate and treat common health problems and promote the health of patients.

• 2.

  Demonstrating medical knowledge through the application of fundamental biomedical, clinical, and social science to the care of patients.

• 3.

  Demonstrating practice-based learning and improvement through critically evaluating performance and identifying opportunities for improvement.

• 4.

  Providing interpersonal and communication skills that develop effective and appropriate relationships with patients, colleagues, and other health professionals.

• 5.

  Demonstrating professionalism through sensitivity and respect of patient individuality, accountability of clinical and educational activities, and interactions with family members as well as colleagues.

• 6.

  Applying a systems-based practice that incorporates the inter-professional healthcare team and protects organizational accountabilities of timeliness, patient-centeredness, and fiscal efficiency.

Reaching these goals can be heavily influenced by the medical educator’s choice of instructional strategies throughout the classroom and clinic. The purpose of this chapter is to introduce strategic examples of instructional strategy implementation throughout the medical education environment in order to achieve instructional goals.