Getting Past the Uncomfortable

Today I gave a presentation for the faculty & fellows in the Division of Pulmonary, Critical Care, Sleep and Allergy in the Department of Medicine. I met with Dr. Christie Brillante a month or so ago because she had heard about some of the presentations I have given here in the college of medicine. I was slightly apprehensive to do this one, because she wanted me to talk about facilitation skills for people who do ‘micro-consults’ which could also be considered bedside consultations, ‘mini-consults’ which are slightly longer, and their regularly scheduled noon conferences.

EEK.

I was nervous because I have never been on rounds before so I did not really feel like I am an appropriate person to speak to it, and I made sure Dr. Brillante knew this. So, I went in, and delivered my presentation. It was a bit difficult as usual getting some of the attendees to speak up, but I persevered. What I can talk about is multimedia design. I shared some of our best practices in the college in regards to PowerPoint slide deck design like choice of color, font, amount of content, and taking into consideration some cognitive issues. In particular, I talked about some of Richard Mayer’s 12 Principles of Multimedia Learning. By the way, this document came from the University of Hartford, Faculty Center for Learning development. I focused on these three:

• Coherence Principle – People learn better when extraneous words, pictures and sounds are excluded rather than included.
• Signaling Principle – People learn better when cues that highlight the organization of the essential material are added.
• Spatial contiguity Principle – People learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near rather than far from each other on the page or screen.

There is a ‘Last Page’ in Academic Medicine journal coming out soon and it was right on target with this topic. It’s called “‘We’re Not Too Busy’: Teaching with Time Constraints on Rounds” by Flint Y. Wang, MD, and Jennifer R. Kogan, MD at Perleman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. I have seen an advance copy of this one and it’s definitely worth looking at when the journal issue comes out.

Here is my presentation via SlideShare. Let me know what you think. I feel like the presentation went well. One of the attendees offered to bring me on consults and I jumped at the chance. It will give me some insight into an area of content facilitation that I am lacking expertise.