Teaching Graduate Students Applied Learning in Health Planning
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I am Phil Reeves and I came to GW in 1967 as a doctoral student. I had just finished a 20 year career in the air force and I decided to make a change. My original intent was to learn Hospital Administration, and as I went through my doctoral program a new program opened up called Health Planning. After I got my degree they asked me if I would not stay and teach this health planning, which I proceeded to do for the next 23 years. There was one gap there where I took a leave of absence and spent some time in a local agency and also with the Department of Health and Human Services just to get a feel of it. Also I had a lot of opportunity to meet a lot of health people because I was contracted with the National Center of Statistics to teach short courses in something called the Applied Statistics Training Institute.
In any event, getting back to teaching, one of my main thrusts was to change the style of teaching. I found what had been done to me had not been very satisfactory and feel a little embarrassed about some of the courses I first taught until I began to learn how to teach. To begin with, you have to start with very clear objectives of what you want to start to accomplish in the course and how to go about it. Have a very clear plan, and also provide the students with a very explicit roadmap of how this is going to play out. Do know what your expectations are and how you are going to evaluate. And one of those things that became obvious is that it is very important to reinforce whatever you’re saying with visuals.
Now I presume most people have PowerPoint, things like that, but also in addition to having the visuals I gave all the students a copy of these visuals so they could use that for note taking. And I divide every course into modules and we cover a module one week and the whole group would be required to do a demonstration about how that would be applied. I was teaching at graduate school and the emphasis there was upon how you could use what you had hopefully learned. In fact, I think that should be true for almost any course. We don’t just take a course for intellectual exercise, but because it’s something that should have some utility. In any event, I also felt that in class tests were not very productive, and as a consequence I substituted assignments, which were out of class, and definitively applied what they had been talking about and we had been discussing in class. Obviously, for each assignment that would be very specific detailed criteria, weighted criteria, as to what were the important points and how well the students had coped with them. And after I had done all the grading I would prepare a written summary – sort of an overall evaluation of class performance- showing the highpoints and some of the weaknesses that I observed in grading those papers.
Another thing which I found very useful was that the students always had assigned readings, and do they read, do they not. What we did was give each student and assignment to prepare three questions on one set of those readings. And the final section of each course was we would go over those questions and discuss them in class. And of course grading those questions was a bit of a challenge because you had to have very specific criteria once again and the criteria there focused on how good the questions were. Did they really require analytic thinking and creative response rather than the yes – no sort of thing you very often encounter. To give some examples of that, one of the classes I taught is Health Services Planning and Marketing. The first major assignment there is to do a feasibility analysis on an MRI or natal intensive care unit or something like that. The second assignment was to come up with a marketing plan to implement that. In another course on policy I started off the first assignment was to do a role development; this would be their persona during the entire course. They had to decide who this person was, and why they had as much power as they had in a political sense. I say they played that role as well. The next thing they had to do was come up with a policy analysis for some particular issue that they wanted to have adopted. Then, following that, we went into an assembly legislative session where they had to learn Robert’s Rules of Order and see which of those items got on the agenda.
And then the final part of the course was more of a voting process where they used their political power to negotiate with one another to see which items would be adopted by the public.
The third course I had was in strategy, and this was somewhat different because a friend of mine at the University of Virginia had developed a game in which there were five hospitals and five groups of students. Each group would develop a strategy for their hospital and as they implemented that strategy they had to see what changes they would make and how they would respond to the activities that the other hospitals had undertaken.
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