Single Slide Summary

I'd like to propose a new rule for hour-long lectures and/or small groups: if you can't summarize what you taught in a single, relatively uncluttered slide, you've tried to teach too much.

Medicine involves a lot of learning and for someone who enjoys learning new things, that's great! Yet, I find I get presented with more information that I actually learn and, of the material I do learn, not much gets retained far beyond the exam.

Yesterday, I went to an informal education session, something outside the official curriculum, but one with value (I believe) to my career as a physician. It wasn't an overly simple session and there was quite a bit of information presented, but it was logically organized with some key learning points. The best part for me was the final slide, which essentially summarized the major lessons of the entire hour. More than a few details were left out of this slide, but because that core knowledge was so clearly presented and easy to memorize, those details were easier to recall.

Medical education - as well as education in general - often forgets to employ the basics of learning in their lessons. Repetition, contextual learning, patterning, scaffolding, even simple things like storytelling, these are poorly utilized in medical education. Over the long term, these concepts are employed, but that seems to be as much by accident as design. What I learn now will be applied in clerkship and residency, but the expectation appears to be that we'll know much of the pre-clerkship material by the time we start clerkship, which of course, isn't the case.

I like the idea of a single slide summary because it slows down the learning a bit. You can't put a lecture full of details or new concepts if you have to summarize it cleanly in one slide. To fill that time, you have to repeat core knowledge a few times, present it in a bit of a different context, or tell a story about how that knowledge is relevant. It forces teachers to actually teach, rather than simply transmit information. We could use a little less information transmission and a little more teaching.