Bite-Sized Teaching: Engaging the Modern Learner in Psychiatry

Abstract

Knowledge acquisition is an important goal of residency and a critical process in becoming a competent psychiatrist both during training and beyond [1]. While the traditional 60-minute lecture remains a popular method for resident didactics, educators must consider the changing needs and preferences of their learners [2]. The current generation of psychiatry trainees, predominately composed of the Millennials, may perceive traditional didactics and formal lectures as unengaging [3, 4]. Residency programs have noticed a trend of decreasing attendance in formal lecture series, and awareness of these attitudes has prompted some programs to reexamine the curriculum and find alternative ways to educate residents [5]. Shorter lecture length has been identified as a potential target to improve learner satisfaction and knowledge retention [3, 4]. Retention of information in a traditional lecture has been noted to decline after only 10 minutes [6, 7], and the retention tends to be highest for materials presented at the beginning and at the end of the lecture [6, 8]. To counteract waning attention, it has been suggested that a 60-minute lecture can be divided into multiple 10to 15-minute segments [9]. Shorter teaching sessions allow for a more focused discussion of salient learning points, hold learners’ attention, and create less conflict with other demands on their time [2]. Shorter, more interactive, and more easily digestible educational formats have been suggested to best match Millennials’ instructional preference based on surveys of Millennial attitudes and behavior [4]. Educational activities can also be tailored to today’s learners by engaging them in their own learning process. Peer-assisted learning (PAL), or peer-peer learning, is defined as “people from similar social groupings who are not professional teachers help each other to learn and learn themselves from teaching” [10]. These strategies are frequently used in undergraduate medical education [11], and a growing number of examples are published in the psychiatry graduate medical education literature [12, 13]. PAL is a valued mode of learning for residents and is thought to enhance learner engagement and content relevance [14–16]. Peer teachers may be better positioned to identify and address learning needs of their peers than faculty. Peer teaching may also foster mastery of the topic in resident presenters during preparation as well as in delivering the talks [16]. We sought to enhance our didactic curriculum by adapting and evaluating an innovative educational format of short, highyield, resident-taught lectures, called bite-sized teaching (BST). BST was initially developed in the J. Willis Hurst Internal Medicine Residency Training Program at Emory University School of Medicine by Kimberly Manning, MD, and colleagues. Given its positive reviews and enthusiasm, the format was initiated for general psychiatry residents in 2017. The aims of the conference are to (1) engage residents in a high-yield educational experience; (2) develop resident teaching skills in the resident presenters; and (3) promote resident-faculty collaboration. In this paper, we describe our implementation of the BST conference for the psychiatry trainees and discuss evaluations and implications for residency training.