While learning from mentors and past experiences have been helpful strategies in developing as a medical educator, many curiosities remain, including how to balance optimal patient care with clinical teaching, adapt to the various individual learning styles that I will inevitably encounter, and design evaluation methods that best promote and reflect skill and knowledge acquisition. I hope to tackle such issues as part of the degree training, so that I become a more effective teacher, and learn how to ask and answer the questions that will advance the teaching of medicine.

 

One such dilemma is how to best facilitate education during experience-based learning. Especially when experiences are time-limited, the education and pedagogic support for some learners may be insufficient to meet core objectives, and can vary considerably in spite of student adherence to adult learning principles. Thus, the standardized elements of the curriculum during training, which often consist of academic half-day didactic presentations, can be very valuable for delivering more critical content. So, when presented with an opportunity to develop and assess the flipped classroom model, my suggestion to substitute this concept for a traditional half-day during paediatric clerkship has since developed into a project proposal that I am passionate about. It is novel in its application to medical education, and shows great promise based on several proposed and demonstrated benefits in multiple settings in higher education. As an added benefit, I will gain expertise in curriculum development and assessment, as well as implementing the flipped classroom strategy. In particular, the hope would be that the flipped classroom model will appeal to medical institutions hoping to develop it for future delivery of medical content, not necessarily limited to paediatric gastroenterology.