Teaching embryology through science fiction and role‐play

Abstract

What problems were addressed? In our teaching of secondand third-year biomedical sciences and intercalating medical students at King’s College London, we frequently observed that students performed well on memorisation and recall tasks, but less well on tasks targeting the understanding of theoretical concepts. One such threshold concept (a concept embedded in the thinking within a research community that students often struggle to grasp, but of which understanding can have a transformative effect on their learning in a specific discipline) is the idea in embryology that signalling factors called morphogens form gradients across tissues and dose-dependently assign multiple different fates to the cells exposed to them. What was tried? In order to engage students with the morphogen concept in a constructive way, we devised a problem-solving workshop based around science fiction and role-play in a second-year embryology module. Although the relatively large class size (around 180 students) makes the implementation of active learning scenarios in this module difficult, we reasoned that if we were to engage the students with the morphogen concept in smaller third-year modules, this would be too late to lay a solid foundation for the efficient learning of embryology in the second and third years of our programmes. To this end, we halve the class and run two workshops of 60 minutes each. In order to create a sense of occasion, we hold the workshops in a teaching laboratory fitted with tables that accommodate eight students each. Students at each table are told that they form a research team that has received a grant to investigate a newly discovered organism: a marine, tube-shaped animal that has three rows of morphologically different tentacles at regular intervals along its head-to-foot axis. We hypothesise that a morphogen gradient along this axis could pattern the tentacle rows. For the next 15 minutes, the groups are tasked with developing a set of three to five defining criteria for what constitutes a morphogen. This activity is supported by 10 tutors who rotate amongst groups and follows a 5-minute interview period in which the session lead asks representatives of each group to present their criteria in front of the class. Subsequently, the groups are asked to spend 20 minutes on devising a set of experiments that test the proposed criteria (also tutor-assisted). This part of the session follows another 10-minute interview period in which groups have the opportunity to ‘pitch’ their proposals. What lessons were learned? We found that this team-based brainstorming activity encouraged students to engage with the morphogen concept in an unprecedentedly deep manner. Despite the large class size, very few students seem to take a back seat within their groups, and student feedback on these classes has been positive throughout. We conclude that making students members of a hypothetical community of practice (a ‘research group’) encourages a constructivist and heuristic learning approach. We also suspect that the fictional element adds a playfulness that uncouples students from the fear of ‘getting it wrong’.