Penn Med School and School of Education team up for training

Sometimes, even educators must be educated.

Penn’s Graduate School of Education is teaming up with the Perelman School of Medicine and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia as part of a new Med Ed program, which aims to teach medical school professors techniques about how to effectively teach medicine.

The program, which will have an initial cohort of just 25 people, will launch in July.

“We’re focusing on how to elevate educational leaders in medicine,” said Allison Ballantine, program director and assistant professor of clinical pediatrics. “Obviously people in medicine have been teaching for centuries, but there are a lot of pressures and a new focus on efficient and effective teaching now in medicine.”

GSE Vice Dean Doug Lynch agreed.

“Learning is everywhere and you would think education schools would be at the center of everything,” Lynch said.

Lynch added that the program will aim to get doctors to think about how they can better work with their patients, as well as better enable medical school professors to help their students learn.

As many medical school professors do not have formal training in teaching, “the goal of this program is to give junior faculty members some concentrated faculty development in teaching and education in a way that is not currently provided,” Professor of Medicine and Vice Chair for Education and Inpatient Services, Lisa Bellini said.

This push to have professors in the Medical School better convey and teach their material led to the need for such a program at Penn.

“We’re trying to take the knowledge that is owned by the academic educational world, the business world [and] the corporate world … and bring it into the academic medical context,” Ballantine said.

Ballantine added that the addition of the Med Ed program makes Penn one of “a handful” of schools in the nation to have such an offering.

“What’s remarkable about Penn is the opportunity to collaborate between schools,” she said. With the current programs at both GSE and the Medical School, she viewed the recent partnership as “a natural marriage.”

Once implemented, there are two aspects on which the Med Ed program will focus, according to Ballantine.

The first piece is the “ground-up integration of the education side and the medical side,” she said.

This aspect of the program aims to contextualize how educational expertise applies in a medical setting, which is a core concept of the program.

The second piece is modeling this program similarly to that of the executive model — which is in place at many business schools throughout the country — in order to make it easier for those who are working full time to attend class.

Though there is a lot of interest coming from Penn itself, “it is designed to be accessible from a distance,” Ballantine said. She explained that Med Ed studies will be open to medical school faculty from across the country.

“It’s a great opportunity for people who are interested in medical education,” Bellini added. “I expect that over the next few years it will really become one of the premier national programs in this area. There really aren’t many and it makes sense that Penn would have one.”

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.