To All MS1s:
“Team-based learning.”
It’s one of the least exciting three-word phrases that can be written into a college course syllabus. In my mind, it ranks just a tad higher than “lecture is mandatory” and just a bit lower than “class meets at 8 AM.”
As my sophomore year Intro Biology professor read those words from the syllabus, the atmosphere of the 120-person lecture hall changed. Sighs of resignation spread throughout the room. My friends and I shared covert, knowing looks.
The professor must have known how students respond to ideas of team-based learning, because she continued with this: “It’ll be good practice for medical school, where everything is done in small groups. Many former students have thanked me for how this course prepared them.”
I didn’t believe a word that she said. For a split second, I wondered whether I should consider a career in investment banking. However, when I started applying and interviewing for medical school, I realized that she was right. (Though, for the record, Intro Biology team-based learning was a not-so-great experience.) Every medical school website emphasized their team-based learning approach. Every tour guide raved about how much they loved their learning team members. Again, I was skeptical.
On the first day of medical school orientation, I remember a feeling of dread as I looked around the room and identified the other students I would be grouped with. In the short time our class had been together, I’d gotten to know these strangers just well enough to know how different they were from me. It worried me to imagine what our dynamic would be like.
As we struggled through one orientation activity after another, my worries began to dissipate. First, we failed to make a rope circle while blindfolded. Then, we failed to build a tower out of sticks and marshmallows. After that, we failed to name state capitals and failed to survive in the wilderness. Along the way, we had a lot of fun, and I began to get to know these incredible people.
Since then, our learning team has continued to grow closer. During in-person small group sessions, we brought in snacks and baked goods (usually desserts that I substituted for breakfast) to share. We were almost always the last ones out of the room — partly because we took time to explain concepts to each other, but mostly because we tended to get very distracted. At the end of every session, we took a few minutes to debrief so we can talk about what went well and what did not. At first, each session ended with a number of large critiques. Now, criticisms are minor and rare. We’ve learned to work well together.
We’ve had our low moments, too. For our first team exam, we met at 7pm, hoping to spend a quick hour on the test and head home. Instead, three hours later, we were still there, bickering over slight differences in phrasing, debating answers that were “good enough” but didn’t seem exactly right, and disagreeing on how we’d split up memorizing material for a closed-book team microbiology test the next week — perhaps exactly what one might expect from six former pre-meds working together for a grade, our first such task yet. We’d been debating little details for a long time, and we decided to call it a night. Feeling separate and alone in our frustration, we silently prepared to head out.
Thankfully, one of us spoke up: “Hey. I don’t want us to leave like this. Can we debrief?” For me, it felt like a massive weight had been lifted. We began to talk again — airing our frustrations about medical school, discussing how to make our next team exam go better, laughing at my plans to make dinner once home at 11pm. Things were okay again.
During the past school year, I saw my learning team almost every day. Every few days, when I’d listen to my teammates talk, I’d smile to myself and think, One day, this person will change the world, and I’ll have known them. Each one of them has something I don’t. Each one of them is someone I want to be more like. Each one of them has taught me so much that I didn’t know about what it means to be a medical student, a citizen, and a friend. It’s been a privilege to get to know them, and they have been one of the best parts of my medical school experience.
I hope your learning team experiences are even better than mine. To that goal, I guess my advice is:
- Give your learning team a good-faith effort. If nobody else is putting in the work to strengthen your team’s relationship, take up the mantle. Some people on my team have done so tirelessly and made us all better for it. I haven’t. I’ll learn to do better.
- Learn from your teammates. Not just their takes on pre-clinical knowledge, but also everything else related to medicine that makes them unique and a future leader in their field. My “thing” is statistics. I bring it up whenever I can, and my learning team groans every time. Their “things” are science, design, advocacy, public health, humanities, and education. I think I’m getting a good deal.
- Debrief. Make a dedicated space to constructively criticize each other and express frustrations. It’s not only useful for improving how your team functions, but also for when you try something new in front of them — you’ll have created an environment where you can expect honest and useful feedback. I don’t know what our team would look like without debriefing.
Best of luck,
Feng
Feng Hu is a MS2 at the Perelman School of Medicine. Feng can be reached by email at [email protected].
