The Sciences of Learning: State of the Art

The Collaboration for InterProfessional Health Education Research & Scholarship (CIPHERS) invites you to their Interprofessional Visiting Professor Talk: “The Sciences of Learning: State of the Art.”

Thursday, June 8
Noon – 1:30 pm
Available via Zoom

Speaker

David Hirsh, MD, FACP
Director, Harvard Medical School (HMS) Academy Medical Education Fellowship
Co-founder and Director, HMS’ Cambridge Integrated Clerkship

Dr. Hirsh graduated summa cum laude in History from Dartmouth College, earned his MD from the University of Virginia, and completed residency at the University of Michigan. Hirsh directs the Harvard Medical School Academy Medical Education Fellowship and is co-founder and Director of the Harvard’s Cambridge Integrated Clerkship–the first academic longitudinal integrated clerkship or “LIC.” (This program helped launch a transformative restructuring of clinical education and is replicated across the US, Canada, Australia, and in other nations). In 2021 was appointed a Harvard Medical School Associate Dean of Undergraduate Medical Education.

Hirsh has received local, national, and international honors for his teaching, academic work, clinical practice, and public service. His scholarship and academic contributions span academic domains, including “educational continuity,” medical education transformation, medical school program design, longitudinal integrated clerkships, OSCEs, clinical skills training and assessment, East Asian constructs of professionalism, humanism in medicine, and the theories and sciences of learning.

Clinically, Hirsh was the longest serving Medical Director of the City of Cambridge Healthcare for the Homeless Program, and he co-founded a community health center. He continues to practice in the Department of Medicine at the Women’s Health Center at Cambridge Health Alliance, to mentor student and faculty research, and to teach students in all years of the HMS curriculum.

Summary
In this metacognitive romp, the speaker will teach empirically-derived educational science engaging the audience using that very educational science—it is “a play within a play” to generate learning and retention about learning and retention.

In more than a century since the Flexner report, the fields that comprise “the sciences of learning” (education, neurobiology of learning, social and cognitive psychology, among others) have advanced greatly. Despite this progress, medical education has been slow to translate these empirically-derived sciences to our educational models, structures, and practices.

In this session, we will actively engage six empirically-derived sciences of learning using these sciences of learning. My hope is that education leaders, classroom teachers, clinical educators, and learners will value and benefit from these approaches and be better able to serve our future learners, patients, and communities thereby.

Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this session, participants will be able to:

• Define and discuss the empirically-derived sciences of learning;
• Practice the sciences of learning metacognitively within the session itself;
• Translate the sciences of learning into medical education and support others to use (and enjoy) these approaches.