Background: For the clinician-educator, balancing patient care duties with educational responsibilities can be challenging.1 New methods are needed to augment the current toolkit of time-efficient teaching methods, which include strategies like the “one-minute preceptor” or bedside rounds.2 One educational strategy of interest is task-based learning (TBL), which structures learning around a clinical task.3,4 Rather than focusing on completion of the task itself, TBL uses performance of the task as an opportunity to learn the fundamental principles and transferable skills underlying completion of the task. TBL is effective because it provides students with structured learning, encourages both action and reflection, and situates learning in the relevant clinical environment. While many studies have demonstrated the success of TBL at a systems level, integrated into school-wide or clerkship curriculum 5,6,7,8, there is unexplored potential in its application for use by the individual educator.
Purpose: Here we describe a novel two-part teaching method called Field Trip-Passport (FTP) that was devised by the author to accomplish clinical duties efficiently while providing appropriate educational opportunities and oversight. The terms “Field Trip” and “Passport” were coined affectionately by students themselves after the successful implementation of the method at our institution on the direct care hospital teaching service (DCHTS), a rotation which pairs medical students directly with hospital medicine attendings.
Description: FTP starts with the generation of a task list by the educator. Each task is structured around a specific patient case and can be drawn from commonly encountered domains, such as performing physical exam maneuvers, providing patient education, or reviewing basic science or clinical reasoning concepts (Table 1). By referencing the patient list for that day, the educator can tailor tasks to fit the cases available in a dynamic process that takes advantage of the unpredictable nature of clinical experience. The task list is given to students as a blank checklist (the Passport). Students then go on “Field Trips” in their own time, independently seeing patients at bedside or visiting other locations in the hospital to complete the tasks. Students document learning gained from completion of each task in the Passport, like collecting stamps after visiting new places, and are empowered to self-direct their learning beyond the basic outline provided by the Passport (Figure 1). Once complete, passports are presented to educators in a debrief session, giving students the opportunity to reflect on and consolidate their learning and educators to fill in gaps. This method can be repeated with new tasks as frequently as the educator desires.
Conclusions: FTP is a novel, time-efficient teaching method grounded in TBL theory that provides students with structured, situated learning in the clinical environment. The autonomous and asynchronous design maximizes student-patient interactions and allows faculty to balance their own demanding clinical schedules with the provision of appropriate educational supervision. Most importantly, students have consistently provided feedback that they find the method highly relevant and engaging. We envision that this method could be applied more broadly by clinician-educators in both inpatient and outpatient settings.
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