KU School of Medicine-Wichita

14 Juan Ruiz Kaleb Todd Sapna Shah Zachary Unruh The coach role brings with it the formal title of assistant director of the Jager Society. Coach and student initially met every other week, but have fine-tuned that based on student needs and the realization that too often was "a saturation point," said Mark Harrison, M.D., another coach. The coaches discuss student evaluations, grades and any concerns, along with their projected specialty track if they have one — and that it's definitely OK to not have one at this point, some- thing Harrison said he points out frequently. "The idea is to help them with their professional goals and turn them into lifelong learners," Moser said. "Man, I wish I'd had something like that in medical school. It sure could have helped me get off to a better start professionally." Enrichment and remediation: These two pieces go hand in hand, as they fall in the same place on the ACE calendar. Each overall learning block lasts eight weeks and is followed by a week where a student gets either enrichment or help mastering troublesome material. "Most of the enrichment opportunities are clinical," said Associate Dean for Research K. James Kallail, Ph.D., who organizes the nearly 70 opportunities students can take part in twice a semes- ter. They range from a host of surgical ones to spending time with an emergen- cy, sports medicine, or family doctor or other specialist. Others involve exposure to leadership in organized medicine or public health, and students can go to those offered by other KU campuses as well. Students needing help mastering material skip enrichment week and work to catch up right then. "All of the students in the first block who needed remediation successfully completed it during that week," Moser said. "That's a better situation than we had in the legacy curriculum. They had to wait until the summer and it hung over them like a cloud. Now they're caught up and can focus on the next material." Honors: The new curriculum also creates an honors track, which if successfully fulfilled brings a notation on the student's diploma. Honors students must be in the top quarter of their class and complete a scholarly project, which involves writing a manuscript and presenting at a conference or symposium by the end of their second year. To take part, students must declare their intent for the track, said Kallail, who is overseeing Wichita honors students. "Some people will declare and fall out," he said, "and some in the top 25 percent will choose not to take part." Problem-based learning, or PBL: The Wichita campus has used these sessions for years, but they are now weekly versus four to six times a semester previously. Each problem, or case, is covered in two sessions over two weeks, and involves the same student groups as case-based learning sessions. The difference is that students will work with the same faculty clinician on cases over their first two years, as opposed to their two or more case-based facilitators who may not be clinicians. The PBLs also don't require prep work — students come in and confront the case cold. "Case-based learning is designed to teach basic science material in a clinical context, while the primary focus of PBL is to apply basic science information to clinical problem- solving," said Moser, adding that students benefit from the PBL instructor's combination of teaching and "real-world" clinical experience. Coaching: Each faculty physician teaching problem-based learning sessions also coaches seven students in a different group. Faculty members have long served as mentors, but this approach formalizes the process. "The big thing that's different is the intensity of it. You're meeting on a very regular basis," said Gerard Brungardt, M.D., one of the coaches. Pieces of the curriculum. Case-based collaborative learning is just one piece of ACE, which is being introduced a class at a time — second- through fourth-years are on the "legacy curriculum" — over the next three years.

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