Breakout sessions

So, I don't know how it is for other universities/courses, but for me very few teaching sessions are well-defined. I don't really know what these "seminars" or "tutorials" are supposed to be, as it's never consistent.
I just turn up and take what I get... sometimes it is essentially a lecture, or sometimes if it's genuinely a "tutorial", we'll be going through a piece of work we are supposed to have already completed. Sometimes "seminars" are interactive-style lectures, which can range from a teacher talking at us with the odd question thrown in, to a teacher grilling you over a subject in detail (painful, but it makes you learn it) or if you're really unlucky, a teacher playing "guess what I'm thinking" and asking you vague questions repeatedly until you finally say what they want to hear.

Even though I never know what a teaching session on my timetable is going to be, this doesn't really bother me. A good teacher will make it work in the way that suits them and us... if they prefer to wax lyrical on a subject for an hour, as long as it's relevant I'm happy to listen.


However there's a new breed of teaching style emerging that is becoming more and more prevalent within the medical school, and so infuriating me more and more often. And that is the "break-out session".

Firstly, what does that even mean? Break out of what? Break out of where? Break-out, as far as I'm concerned, means "escape"... what are we escaping?

As far as I can gather, modern teaching ideals say that sitting us all in a lecture to be fed information is bad and wrong, and everything should be interactive and have feedback and involve discussions of how we feel about the subject.
So instead of say, sitting 400 people in a lecture theatre to listen to an expert explain a subject to us, they split us into small groups, put us into a variety of junk-filled classrooms and make us spend an hour with a chirpy "medical educator" who spends the first 10 minutes asking us to brainstorm what we already know about catheters. NOTHING. THAT'S WHY I'M HERE.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to group discussion/communication practise. There's some instances where the medical school does it really well- I love it when we get the chance to talk to the actor patients, or "expert patients" (usually someone living with a long-term condition), because we get clear, personal feedback on how we are doing, and useful insight from an outside person.

But often I feel that it is forced unnecessarily, or with no clear guidelines to what we're doing and why. Earlier this year I found myself sitting with 4 other people looking at a Freda Kahlo painting and discussing the answers to a list of questions about how this reflected her feelings about her medical conditions. "I guess she feels... sad?" Sorry, but without someone with some kind of arts or humanities background to help me in this, I'm not really going to have a clue. And what does it matter what I think actually? Unless the medical school is worried that I'm incapable of feeling and empathy (and don't worry, I always cry at the end of Gladiator) I find it highly unlikely that a patient is going to present to me with an abstract self-portrait of her body for me to interpret. "Hmmm, there's a lot of heavy brush-strokes in this... perhaps she's got MS".
(I actually did take a Self-Selected Module in Medicine and Art, and found it really interesting... WHEN I WAS BEING TAUGHT BY AN ART LECTURER.)

I struggle with Ethics lessons in a similiar fashion. The teachers have an infuriating habit of bringing up a case study of a previous real-life ethical dilemma, making us put forward our opinions on it, and then moving on. Why not tell us what happened? What would be wrong with letting us know what the outcome of the court case was? I wish they'd give us a general idea of what happens. It gets to the point that I'm worrying that everyone in the class will just reach some terrible conclusion without being challenged: "I think we should kill the baby. Killing the baby everyone? Yeah? Sounds good to us all then..."


My final problem with break-out sessions is less about teaching and more about fellow students: there's always a risk with group work, that you'll end up with one of the several overly self-important people in our year. They dominate every session they are in- interrupting to ask difficult questions to highlight their own intelligence, trying to debate lecturers over irrelevant technicalities, and often completely missing the point of the session in their attempt to make themselves look as impressive as possible. Most awkwardly for me, I have witnessed fellow students act more rudely with a session leader who wasn't a doctor- correcting them on medical points unnecessarily, and irritatingly for me wasting the only time we got to listen to how their role in the treatment worked.
Still, I'm sure I will end up working with doctors who are just like that, so I guess if nothing else, I'll gain the skill of putting up with annoying people!


So yeah. Call me old-fashioned, but I don't think that scientific fact needs to be taught in any way radically different to a lecture- an expert telling me what I need to know. All this discussion business achieves nothing, wastes time, and generally makes me want to fulfil the name of the session and break out of it :-p

(This entry also posted at hospitaldr.co.uk)