2020 TEACH Education Day

I can assure you that we did not have any insight into the complications that this year would bring when we planned this topic in presenter however i really can't think of a better time to discuss this topic than we were when we're all trying to adjust to better relate to our learners across the board i first met dr tillman when he and i worked together on a steering committee for the double amc related to academies collaborative and then when i saw him speak on a topic similar to what you all hear today when btc hosted the 2019 imz conference at hotel roanoke which now seems like at least three to five years ago despite the fact that it was in 2019 i knew we had to get him here for our broader faculty dr tillman is a professor in the department of pathology and microbiology at the university of nebraska medical center in omaha nebraska specializing in gastrointestinal renal and placental pathology he completed his residency in anatomic and clinical pathology at unmc a fellowship in surgical pathology at the mayo clinic and a master of education and health professions from johns hopkins university dr tolman serves as assistant dean for medical education within the college of medicine in the department of pathology and microbiology he's the vice chair for medical education he was also the first james linder distinguished residency director chair and program co-chair for unmc master in health profession professions teaching and technology program he also served as the inaugural director of unmc interprofessional academy for educators which is how we first knew each other um dr taubman has over 90 peer-reviewed publications to his credit along with multiple book chapters and invited presentations the book he co-edited mind the gap generational differences in in medical education is the first such work dedicated to managing intergenerational conflict in all areas of medical education he is the current president of the nebraska association of pathologists and a member of the board of governors for the american society of clinical pathology board of certification um so i think uh it dr tillman did this uh same presentation this morning at seven o'clock and i learned a ton of information about how to interact with my learners also how to interact with my children in different ways as i'm um now uh as many of us are uh part-time teachers uh as well throughout the day and evening in addition to our regular job so please join me in welcoming dr jack doman take it away jeff hi everybody thanks for the invitation to come speak about this this is something that is i kind of developed an interest kind of out of self i don't know for self improvement more than anything else um i wish i could be there to meet all of you all in person but you get the opportunity to get at least a small corner of omaha in your life for the day so that that's my gift to you i guess um as i said i got interested in this just because i just wanted to make my own teaching better i was relating this morning that we were at a meeting with a bunch of pathology teachers and lamenting how you know when we first got got into practice and started teaching gosh you know our evaluations are great we could motivate students but then all of a sudden it seemed like over the course of two or three years that just stopped like well we didn't change anything what what happened there so maybe the learners changed and as we sit here and contemplate being learner centered which is what we're which is what our job is if we're doing things correctly you need to know your learners if people are truly changing you need to know your learners to be able to be learner centered so that got me interested in learning more about generational to intergenerational dynamics and specifically the generation that's coming up and what became very clear to me was millennials who everybody has heard talked about ad nauseam they're on their way out of the medical health professions education um sphere there's a new group coming in and they are different and so to be learner centered it behooves us to understand that group i've also had the opportunity for the past 10 years or so to teach a high school class i teach bio pathology actually to high schools juniors and seniors from all over the omaha area what uh twice a week and that's a very eye-opening experience and i'm starting to see some tendencies that i saw down there percolate up into our undergraduate medical medical students so it's uh as i said it's it's becoming very apparent that probably having some understanding of this was important for me to change my teaching and to just consider how i how i approach students moving forward so that's the point of today i wanted to share thoughts experiences as well as things that the literature say up to this point already um no conflicts of interest um as i mentioned this morning though if anybody knows of any lucrative ones then send them my way there aren't too many conflicts of interest for educators it seems like this is what we're going to be doing today we're going to review the the four major generations that are active in health care and health professions education right now we're going to talk a lot about the origin of the characteristics in quotation marks of our current learners millennials and then use that as a springboard to contrast them with generation z gen z their preferences perspectives tendencies and how that may impact their interface with the educational environment and finally wrapping it all up taking all of those lessons together translating that to some potential strategies if you were considering interacting with the next generation of medical uh medical students based on what we know so far so a good place to start as any is defining what a generation is and i know you folks probably all know this but the easiest definition is a group of individuals were born and living in the same time lengths of generation vary depending on what lens you're using 20 years is a good estimate for how long a generation lasts and the belief or practice of viewing things from a generational perspective is all based on the idea that when individuals have shared experiences during their formative years particularly related to technological advancements pop culture phenomenon and um and world events that there's a common drive or a common effect on their adult behavior and so that underscores everything that we're we're talking about now before going any further this talk has some black box warnings that we need to get out of the way first off um admittedly any conversation about generations represents wholesale generalizations we're going to talk about that more in detail later and there's also inherent bias particularly when you're looking at the descriptions of older generations data have borne this out that there's a decided tilt towards white western males i am in no way throughout any of this talk saying that one generation's perspective is right or wrong except gen x gen x is always right just come to grips with that and in no way am i advocating for change as a part of this talk if this is meant to raise awareness to suggest potential strategies more submitting things for your consideration than than a call to action so these are the way we are going to refer to the generations that are in society right now we live in an unprecedented time in american history where there are five generations that are interacting regularly this has never happened before because we're living longer and we're healthy longer um these are the the names we're going to use and the approximate birth dates again depending on who you read these change a little bit but this is just kind of a nice rule of thumb traditionalists we're not going to talk about a lot this group um the the the world war ii era folks the greatest generation of their name they're transitioning out of health professions education right now many of them are emeritus faculty are fully retired so if you look at the medical education landscape as it exists today from a generational perspective this pretty much characterizes it very well many senior faculty are baby boomers mid-career faculty or gen x and i still have a hard time admitting that i'm mid-career faculty that's just hard for me to come to grips with and we all know that our medical students residents and junior faculty are predominantly of the millennial generation or that description but if we fast forward just 10 years in the future which ain't that long when you've come to think about it things are going to change gen x is probably going to transition into the most senior faculty roles millennials will adopt the mid correct mid-career position that many of our junior faculty medical students residents our junior colleagues and those that we train are going to be of a different generation so it behooves us over the course of the next few years to understand that group better so let's as sort of a level setting here let's talk about the characteristics of the generations and i think this is useful because as we talk about gen z knowing you or at least the generational tendencies of those that uh that are ascribed to your generation may be useful now again depending on who you read there's tons of literature out there in in the popular press as well as any internet website you can look at has descriptions of generations i've distilled these down from several what i think are um more credible sources and picked out things that i think are applicable to health professions education and health care for to to share here now so let's talk about them um baby boomers just to kind of just describe them in a little more detail they were actually the first generation to be called the me generation a moniker that was often associated with millennials inappropriately uh you can see the time the what was going on in the united states history during their during their formative years which had an impact on their core values and the core values that are often espoused towards baby boomers are equal rights and equal opportunity their views on authority are all things being equal meaning others not knowing anything else out of a group the most accomplished individual is the one that should lead and rules are good until such time as they conflict with what i potentially want or need and then maybe they need to be readdressed oftentimes what is what has what has been described about baby boomers is uh in terms of their interface with their careers is a good app description is they live to work and that means that their career is core to their identity so this is where the term workaholic the 60 to 80 hour work week that's where this came this came to be to describe many baby boomers attitudes toward their careers and what's said if you want to motivate a baby boomer one of the best ways to do it is to recognize their accomplishments something i read once which whether it's true or not is they said if you don't know anything about any individuals and just wander around an office sometimes you can figure out who the baby boomers are and those are the ones that have every plaque diploma award every everything posted on their walls for everybody to see you don't see another wall of my office because you would see that in mine gen x called the latchkey generation because many times both of their parents were out of the house working came of age during a different time in american history it was during the 80s uh maybe early 90s a much different period in american history because of the fact that they were forced to be more append independent as a rule because both parents were working that had an impact on their core values and what's what are often described to gen xers or is a sense of independence open communication and an inherent distrust of institutions and authority most mostly watching how their baby boomer parents interacted with the world say for example during the the recession of the eighties their views on authority are all things being equal the leader is the person who demonstrates they can do the job i don't care about your i don't care about your experience i don't care your time and grade what i care about is can you do the job and rules should be there to help get the job done fairly and appropriately otherwise they don't serve a purpose generate gen x uh treats jobs their career a little bit differently more is a means to an end it's a contractual arrangement i am here in this position to get a skill or to get a bit of experience to move on to the next thing and if you want to motivate a gen xer the probably one of the best ways to do it is to give them flexibility and independence to define their own schedules rules tell me what you want and then leave me alone also balance with outside lives again watching their baby boomer parents gen xers tended to want to ensure that there was some separation between work life and personal life and that one didn't eclipse the other the off described millennials an older term for them was gen y um they uh their formative years were during the relatively prosperous 90s and early 2000s during the tech boom when things were relatively stable uh many of the technological advances that that were present during their formative years would have been considered high technology by older generations as a result of some of this the core values that are often linked to millennials include a spirit of collaboration integrating technology in daily life as well as input and feedback in all sendings but settings bi-directional we'll talk a little bit about that more in a second their fuse on authority all things being equal is that the leader of a group is a person who can facilitate the group getting its job done i don't even care if you have subject matter expertise if you can manage the group you should be in charge and rules are good we should follow them but they should be defendable they should make sense and i should have an opportunity to comment on them or ask about them their work ethic is often said that much like gen xers to balance home life and personal life much more comfortable collaboration and often something that that sometimes thing that motivates millennials and using those those axioms they work to have fun what is said is a millennial's attitude toward this job is i work so i can do the things that i want to do outside of work and so if you want to motivate a millennial one of the things to do is provide them balance much like with a gen xer but also play up the the uh participation in a dynamic energetic team and also millennials are often stated to be more altruistic than the older generation so showing how they can give back to society and others is important now if i was with you all right now what i would do is i would ask everybody i wouldn't ask everybody what generation you're a part of but what i would say is the description i just i gave to you about your generation how much did that 100 percent fit you to a t and this would be about the time that when we did this well about half usually less will say that and it underscores something that i think we all know um there's a lot more that goes into my preferences perspectives expectations so on and so forth then what decade i was born in i all i know individuals have an exact same birth date as me but we're raised in completely different portions of the world with completely different cultural and socioeconomic background etc etc that are vastly different and what this goes to show is be very careful using generational descriptions to discuss a person an individual person there may be value in looking at generational perspectives as shifts of large group of people over time but please be cautious saying oh that's such a millennial thing for you to do or gosh what a boomer again that doesn't mean much and i'm going to show you a slide later on that kind of shows that some of those things that we always talk about probably aren't true but again there is potentially value in looking at shifts of the american public over time and that may be the value of looking at things from a generational perspective and that's i guess the belief that i'm espousing with this talk in general so before we talk about gen z let's talk about our current our current learners and and junior colleagues millennials and i think what i want to do is a little different spin on this and i want to talk about where they come from where their tendencies originate because if you understand that not only do you have a little bit under better understanding of the descriptions of millennials and why but also it provides a very interesting uh contrast to gen z and you start to understand why they're a little different or they're probably going to be a little bit different so i start with this i love this cartoon one because it makes me chuckle but it underscores one of i think the key things that occurred during during the upbringing of millennials as compared to older generations that a lot of people forget these two these two poor kids running from soccer practice one of them is probably in the midst of starting maybe homework the other one is carrying something for the for the next organized event they had to go to and my point in this is that millennials came from compared to older generations usually a much much much more organized regimented childhood experience not a lot of free downtime in comparative comparatively but there's a person in this whole dynamic when you talk about generations that is often ignored and it's this any if for those you can guess this person right here the quintessential soccer mom slash soccer dad generational tendencies don't spontaneously generate and i think you will find very few five six seven eight-year-olds that if left to their own devices want to go from soccer practice to this to piano lessons to this play date to this organized club to this church group whatever they don't want they don't do that naturally generational tendencies come from somewhere as i told my mother one time when i was a teenager and i did something she didn't like i said well my behavior in large part is explained by genetics or environment and either way i think we know who's to blame yeah i'm surprised i've actually survived as long as i have so let's talk about these these are things that if you read you can find these ads this is what people always talk about right um first off let's this is where let's talk about their millennials childhood for those of us in older generations it's necessary to think about this as i mentioned before millennials had very highly scheduled childhoods as compared to hours one at one organization activity followed by another followed by another much less downtime unstructured time particularly compared to gen xers who had tons of unstructured time because of that in large part they had a lot of input and influence on their family environments often dictating when we ate dinner what we ate where we went on vacation in some instances uh where we lived based on the fact that there was an activity i was involved in i remember so many friends moving for say for example for hockey the parenting that occurred with many millennials was much more hands-on than previous generations particularly gen x as a rule uh the term that many of you heard use that i will only briefly mention helicopter parenting is one way that i don't like that term but parents were much more involved in the day-to-day lives of millennial children than from pre than older generations and there were two messages that were espoused constantly during millennials upbringing one and the and stepping back these messages were everywhere school popular proper media popular culture the clubs and organizations they belong to and those two messages were participation in the team is important and you can be anything you want to be and for some of us who are older those were not messages we heard you perform and you can be things that you you may be able to do certain things if you work hard those were the messages we got and also because of the fact that they were had so much technology at their fingertips as our society became more technological that was a part of their daily lives so if you look at the things that people often say about millennials the characteristics notice i'm hearing you very deliberate air quotes here for a reason the preference for that preference for clear explicit expectations and a relative discomfort with ambiguity compared to older generations may be a result of the fact that they didn't have as much downtime as older generations did the fact that they had such a large input into their family lives is probably translated into some of the tendencies that have been described which is where authority figures should listen to in some mentions is act on their feedback and no topic is off limits i remember the first time that i had a resident a couple years ago to talk to me about my salary which was something i would never have had the spinal fortitude to talk to and attending about when i was their age that hands-on parenting has led to that preference and slash need for immediate specific feedback as well as readily available crisis support those two messages that probably probably parlayed into a couple things one that sense of collaboration that many millennials are often said to value probably comes from that message that they heard growing up and the heist and millennials often said to have a very high self-esteem at this stage of their life compared to older generations now that has been eclipsed by gen z as we'll talk about in a second but again that's probably due to some of the messaging they received as kids and their communication preferences in no small part and probably no doubt have to do with the fact that technology was being integrated into their daily lives as they were growing up now i'm going to put this slide up here and give you about a few seconds to look at these statistics for a sec there's a lot of shade i think thrown at millennials um and i'm sure many of you have in some way if you if you if you are a younger learner or part of the millennial crew you've probably seen eye rolls or your people mutter under their breath and of the older generations you probably we've probably done it ourselves but these sources right here big sources doing all doing all sorts of of studies and surveys have shown that some of the things that we attribute to the younger generation probably aren't accurate so and when i look at this what these statistics tell me is that humans in general are driven humans in general compare their performance to their peers they follow the rules and listen to people in authority they respect their elders and they work hard what may differ between individuals of different generations is their starting place their expectations or preferences but humans as a rule are driven and want to succeed and so again this again underscores the message i had a few minutes ago where i said be very careful using generational monikers to describe or categorize a person all right as i said this morning 20 minutes into this i'm now into the crux of this talk we've laid a lot of groundwork which i think is good what i want to talk about now is what we know about gen z the learners that are coming and they're knocking at the door in fact the oldest gen ziers are probably in college right about now and remember that these generational changes are not hard and fast it's like all of a sudden if you were born on december 31st you're one generation and if you're january 1st it's another it's not the way it is but but these shifts do occur over time in some cases more rapidly than you think so for those of you who spend time in the pediatric world much like we say that uh children are not just little adults gen zers are not just little millennials they came of age in a different time they've had different experiences so they it's already shown that they're a little bit different than the millennial predecessors and i think we're going to continue to see those differences play out so who are they well they have a lot of names and of course they don't like any of them so we're going to call them gen z because that seems to be what most people use this generation probably began with people that were born at about the turn of the century and there's some debate as to what this generation is still going on from time they make up the largest percentage of the united states population four in ten consumers are part of this generation and they themselves have either [Music] access control or indeed a discretionary spending so what that means is they have been heavily studied by the business sector because they want their money as a result we probably know more about gen z at this stage of their life than we have about many of the other preceding generations because we all know money drives everything gen z is among the most diver it is the most diverse generation in american american population right now some things to pull out and these are already 10 years old um the number of individuals in the 2010 census that identified as hispanic quadrupled over the previous census and the number of individuals who identified as multiracial doubled and just a little tidbit for you this is probably the last generation in american society where this blue piece of the pie this non-hispanic white is going to be greater than 50 percent millennials who came of age remember millennials came of age in the relatively prosperous 90s as i mentioned the society that gen zier's came of age in is much different they came of age in the post-9 11 society and the events that they've witnessed include the great recession the political polarization that you don't have to go far to find evidence of the ever-present threat of mass shootings and terrorism multiple foreign wars have been a part of just their daily life since as long as they can remember and covet covet is going to have a huge impact on this generation we are just even beginning to scratch the surface and we'll talk a little bit about that going forward but the same time some good things they've seen us huge strides for equality for example on the front of gay marriage also the fact that they've the reality of an african-american president is nothing foreign to them that they it's it's just it happens which for previous generations it was it's a huge deal consequently also um the media that they tend to consume is much more concentrated on negativity than in prior generations which has kind of flavored their their impact not only with social media but also with the world well pretty much every gen zero has seen someone that they idolize experience a very public public failure scandal something or else and that has probably had an impact on the way they view the world the younger baby boomers older gen xers gen zers have been raised primarily by mid to young mid to youngest gen xers so consequently the parents who are raising them are a little different and the style of parenting has changed a bit and i you know we've gone from that so-called helicopter parenting to something that i call cia parenting which using technology obviously i'm always there i'm always watching you just may not see me also parents are often just as technologically fluid as their kids and they like to share in their trends as a result i was just i was talking about this morning that i have two gen z kids and i'm very i'm very interested in what they're doing online and on their devices and that it's not as much that i'm worried about they're going to get in trouble i am that's because the stuff they're doing is cool and i want that app on my phone or i want to watch that i want to watch that youtube video that's pretty cool gen z has also had some some gen x tendencies instilled in them as compared to millennials they're they're play us a much higher premium on independence and one of the messages they've heard from their parents over and over is you are going to fail you have to know how to deal with it and that apparent skepticism that gen xers have has also kind of been instilled in gen z [Music] which is kind of translated or find your own way so this is where i want to chart my own course well jen's ears are much more entrepreneurial at this stage than predecessors they also tend to want to have their own paths in life as opposed uh for them news study after study has shown that they're much more pragmatic and skeptical of the world than the much more altruistic almost idealistic millennials um one study in the study that i cite down here actually showed that in in their survey that they were the least likely of all generations to believe in the american dream and this was actually pre-coveted uh meaning that belief that if i work harder i can do better than my parents they expect that they're going to have to pay more dues and and put in more hours and and grind at lower ranks than their predecessors but they're also more risk-averse and frugal and there's some interesting data showing if you look at trends things like smoking and teenage drinking and even weird things like getting tattoos they're less common amongst genzirs at this age than it were against than they were with older generations the one thing that is non-negotiable for gen zers is equality if they see something as being inequitable or unfair they will tell you and they will rail against it interestingly enough and throughout all of this they are still very confident in fact probably more confident than their their millennial predecessors and there was this one study from this same survey group that i this marketing survey firm that showed that full 20 percent of the people that they talked to said their goal was to be the best in the world at x we can't go too far talking about millennial or sargenzi genziers without talking about technology these individuals have been holding devices as long as they were been physically capable technology is integral to their identity and this book here which i recommended this morning i also recommend is by dan stillman you can actually get it on amazon gen z it works very short it's a very interesting read he coined the term fidget to describe jen's ears saying that they existed in a state where every aspect of the physical world had a digital counterpart and they were equivalent meeting in zoom versus meeting physically same thing to a gen xer no difference because if you think about it gen z came of age at a time when the biggest taxi company in the country owns almost no vehicles one of the largest entertainment companies in the country has no significant infrastructure related to uh related things like movies and tv stations and so on and so forth and zoom meetings have been these these online virtual meetings have been a part of their existence for a long time even if you go back to the way they game this is some of their friends they only know virtually and again this is normal for them so it goes without saying that gen z has always known the internet and social media they've never been cognizant at a time when these didn't exist one us one of the service uh sources i quote below says that more than half of them spend at least nine hours a day on electronic media and i can tell you look watching my two kids that's probably an over a much say an underestimate nine hours is an underestimate and again like another underestimate a full more than 75 percent of them have access to smartphones and they've done studies showing that if you leave a gen z or by themselves their own devices they are reaching for that device every seven minutes and the reason why is because because of this environment they live in their lives are moving incredibly fast their friends what's going on at school the stuff they follow in pop culture are moving so fast that this fear of missing out fomo is very prevalent in their in their mind all the time so to agenzier this these might as well be stone tablets what the heck are these i found these in my parents closet i don't know what you do with them this activity right here is going to be foreign or something i do as a last resort because usually i just ask siri hey how do i get to this place and serial chart me of course based on weather patterns and what the best traffic is google to agenzier has always been a verb and do not tell a gen xer that this is a pound sign they will not know what that means gen z without a doubt is the video generation and you can see where they tend to get there when they get their sources most of it notices on is online tv is actually third in the list behind youtube and netflix and this one the again this marketing group did studies showing that on average the the gen zeros that they were interviewing watch 68 videos a day on average 95 percent of the individuals in that group say they're on youtube every day and 50 said they can't live without it might echoes my kids a lot but i think the thing that's most selling for us as educators is this last bit here a full two-thirds said they regularly use youtube for how-to information if i don't know what to do i get on youtube and find a video but they don't just consume content they create it and post it as well and there's this phenomenon that the marketing firms use called being having a curated self meaning because the fact that gen zeirs tend to use uh platforms where their posts are temporary they create their persona based on what's online and they're able to shed it and tweak it as they wish so this comfort with creating content is probably something we can leverage with this group of students moving forward all so important to them is gaming now for those of us who are older there's a connotation of the gamer who lives in their basement you know you know you know the you know the stereotype but at least for almost for most gen zeros at least an hour of that nine hours every day is spent gaming that can be on consoles or pc but also simple things just like smartphone apps which i'm sure we all do probably more than that but marketing firms have found that what they prefer is customizability things that give online awards and badging as well as anything that provides immediate feedback and this may sound very familiar to those of us who are trying to develop learner-centered things because these lessons are kind of universal across the board when dealing with younger millennials gen zers in terms of how they communicate we're seeing similar trends to older generations in the sense that the least used app on a gen zero's phone is the phone itself and we're seeing an increase in the use of social media as the way they way they communicate with those close to them so for gen zer email is what they use to talk to old people like me facebook is the stuff that i want my parents to see instagram and snapchat that's really where i am and youtube is the place that i go to find information if i need it this becomes useful for us to know if we're going to try to engage gen zers where they are to know what they use these various social media platforms for i've seen initiatives fail because individuals are are not going to the students with the things that they want them to do in the place where they live and chances are this slide is going to be out of date within a year anyway so it behooves us to kind of understand what's going on with gen z or social media uh practices so what lessons have we learned remember i said that gen z has been heavily studied so what have we learned what do we already know so marketing firms have known a lot and that can inform message educators but also as i said the the older gen zers are already in college so our undergraduate colleagues probably have some words of wisdom for us what the business community has found is that jen's ears like customization they also like convenience everything available on demand information should be bite-sized if you want to get their attention and that jen's ears are very adept at task switching flipping back and forth between personal professional life personal life school life they do that as a matter of course and they don't see it as disrespectful they just see it as using their time remember fomo that's what they're concerned about despite all of this personal relationships are a priority remember this is a this is a group that may post something on a celebrity social media account and get a response for those of us that are older no one and no celebrity ever contacted me but this is the reality these kids live in and personal relationships are something that they value and it goes without saying feedback is what they want not only giving it and receiving it but also reviewing other people's feedback this is the yelp generation remember so that immediate that feedback needs to be immediate frequent and also available for review if need this may have implications say for example for recruitment our undergraduate predecessors what have they taught us well they see compared to millennials that there's a much higher tendency for diy learning meaning task oriented learning as opposed to subject-oriented learning don't tell me teach me algebra teach me the formula i need to solve the problem also they tend to gather information in a multi-channel fashion that means as opposed to me which might have a textbook and the notes open when i was studying they might a gen z or might have that but they might also have a youtube video playing at the same time and a chat going on with their classmates one thing that also has been noticed by our predecessors is that in this era of ai where google makes suggestions about what i'm looking for or hyperlinks hyperlinks and articles and text that this may have negatively impacted gen zero's abilities to make conceptual connections compared to their older pro their older colleagues and despite the fact they live online jen's ears appear to have a much more difficulty distinguishing fact from opinion that kind of task switching is also something that our undergraduate uh predecessors have also noticed notice i didn't say multitasking because the human brain can't multitask but they can task switch and just some some data that i'm sure all of you if you spend any time lecturing to med students or or any health professional students you can you know this is true uh the the this one one of these articles down here showed that ninety percent of college students currently text during class and they don't just text once or twice many of them all these two thirds and they're doing non-class related activities while they're in class but also that some cognitive psychologists are wondering if this is contributing to an inability to attend as long to a single source if you've ever wondered why they're why you're only you have to watch a video for five seconds before you can skip it it has to do with the back of the attention filters of younger generations that's how long you've got to hook them so covet is having an impact and i bring it up here because of the fact that the undergraduate crew is going to be coming to us pretty soon and kova's impact on undergraduate studies is going to be felt by us pretty quickly and just some information just some really recent information um 13 of college students in those in the survey that was quoted below this working paper said that they delayed graduation as a result of cobit and that's almost 50 more likely individuals or first generation college students which i think says a lot implicitly half of reported reductions in academic performance more than 40 percent have lost a job or offer of internship as a result of all this which i think also has some recruitment implications for us and what we expect of applicants a full third of them say they fully expect to earn less than they expected to as a result of everything and there's been a lot of major hopping as a result and one thing that we're seeing since the economy is starting to to become become less strong whenever that happens the number of individuals interested in going into medicine increases and we're starting to see that already and new england journal article that came out just a few weeks ago showed that some application applications to medical school are already up 50 percent so kovid's having an impact on what we're seeing and we'll probably continue to do for a while so all this being said what does this all translate into well some things we probably need to stress more so than we had for for our current medical students are some things that we've mentioned in the lessons learned linkage of concept that's probably much more important for jen's ears than it was for uh young older generations how to frame questions approach the whole concept of inquiry and self-directed learning how to vet content we're probably going to need to do it very good and continue to do a very good job of teaching students how to do that and because this is the yelp generation we're going to have to teach them how to handle feedback how to provide it in a constructive professional manner if you spend any time on youtube comments you know gen z doesn't do that as well as how to respond to it how to glean from feedback what to improve upon what about the lecture well i'm sorry to say and so this picture i took we have a medical school class about 132 students this would be considered superb attendance for us at a lecture this ain't gonna change in fact it may even be a little bit worse with gen z unless we change what we do in our lecture time so as i mentioned this is the video generation and a couple of sources have actually should have done surveys have shown that virgin is their method for information acquisition and notice that very clear information acquisition is video already one out of three of them regularly watch lessons online and the the preference for physical material is declining understandably so so this may be something that if we want to it meet gen z where they are it's something we may have to consider doing i'm not advocating for it but i'm just telling you the reality so if we go back to 19 her when i was a medical student this was what i had available to me to study i had maybe a textbook some notes i took in class maybe a handout that a professor provided me but it was definitely a seller's market nowadays this is what students have no shortage of places to go and we are actively competing with students attention in this it is definitely a buyer's market and it will be for agencies going forward and that's something that we have to kind of understand as educators to just give you an example of this as i mentioned i teach a high school class and one of the things i teach in the classes about hemostasis and so i was talking about the coagulation cascade of my students a couple years ago and after class one the students came up and asked me a question it had nothing to do with what i was talking it's like well gosh where did you hear this because it wasn't in the readings it wasn't anything i talked about and he pulled up his computer and showed me this saying well i saw it in this khan academy video like wow that's pretty interesting so talk to me about how you used that he said well dr tom let me tell you i don't learn the material from you i learn it here i use your stuff to tell me what's going to be on your tests so whoa that's pretty interesting and actually if you spend enough time talking to undergraduate medical students that tends to it's becoming a more more common practice so then i asked them one step further i said so how did you pick this how did you decide this is what you wanted to look at and he said it was the shortest so i think we're gonna probably need to be providing guidance we need to be cognizant of what our what gen z students are using because they will be using stuff outside in fact that may be their primary method of gathering information not only cognizant of it but perhaps and um probably really provide them guidance so just look at all the things that are available for board prep now when i was growing up or growing up getting ready for med for that we had one maybe two things we could use now there's no shortage of things and this just underscores the uh all the the vast amounts of material that are out there questionable quality a differing ability to mesh with what i want to teach so it requires us to know what's going on and guide our students particularly as gen z uh amplifies the practices we're already seeing so we need to have an awareness of what's used instruct probably teach them how to vet content again coming back to fact versus opinion how to live in an online environment of education we may have to curate resources and perhaps maybe incorporate some of these into lessons so we are now starting as a part of our course evaluations to ask students what they are using outside just as a part of just the standard evaluation practice and the reason we do that is we share this with our course director so they can know what's going on but also so we have a handle on it and we can see okay all of our students tend to be going here what's going on there why that because that can inform us when we start to when we start to curriculum plan or or individual lectures are doing what they do they know where students are going one of our uh sets of teachers has actually turned into this a little bit leaned into it so for those of you who who know it much about microbiology in the undergraduate arena this is sketchy micro it's a the one for proteus and we found that our our students were using this pretty much solely to learn microbiology content so what our the the professors that teach this now acknowledge that fact and reference sketchy in their teaching they don't use it solely but they say hey sketchy talked about this that may not be entirely accurate or i want to expand on this point a little bit because there's something else you need to know again they utilized what students were using to connect with them a little better and again this tendency is gonna be even more pronounced with gen z as they as they enter our roles so the question do you take away or integrate their devices i think we're going to have to integrate them with gen z they're going to have their devices out they're going to use them so let's use that to our advantage let's utilize social media again with the caveats i talked about let's maybe include some gamification in there but remember these students are used to reflecting they reflect on what they had for lunch let's use that use those reflection use that student created that desire for student created content to our advantage and perhaps that's a good strategy for us to use with gen z moving forward despite all this technophilia and this is about the time that one of my colleagues here would say well let's put all my content online let's do that no again they may prefer information acquisition to come from video and online sources but they what they still place an intense premium on in-person interaction live experiences what they really hunger for is practical application and personal experiences they want your stories they can get the information anywhere what they're turning to us for what gen z will be turning to us for is how do i use it what does this mean to me as i kind of mentioned utilize to leverage that reflection uh capability that they all they all have but one other thing is we were designing self-directed learning activity or are learner-centered materials for millennials well group work everything needs to be grouper group group group group they all want to work in groups guess what gen zers they don't so much because of that independence that's being espoused in them they one of the things that said that's been stated is they'd like to work around people not necessarily with them so thinking that putting all sorts of small group activities in it will will connect with gen z the same way it did with millennials may not be true communication utilize online the the lessons from our business community short frequent messages again in person interactions they can be virtual gen z is fine with that but schedule interactions where they can learn from the practical application how do i use that material i learned over there hugely important hugely important one positive from lemonade that came out of the covered lemons is the monument good good thank you for calling me that day but we were forced to actually align very very well with some of the preferences that gen z seems to uh adhere to they seem to want from education so something to think about as we move forward is let's once this health crisis is over don't abandon everything wholesale because some of these lessons may actually help us connect better with gen z as they roll into health professions education feedback much like millennials they're going to want feedback as i mentioned before to receive it real time task based um they want to actually not only but also they not only receive it but also give it one thing that's been shown that some businesses have found is that gen zeros are not quite as good at being able to interpret large gluts of feedback like the semiannual eval those aren't quite those aren't as impactful with gen zeros in fact many corporations are starting to move to like dashboards for feedback or sound bites little five minute end of the water cooler end of day evaluation appraisal things like that that tends to hold a lot of sway and they found that's that's very useful panera is a very very good example of a corporation that has gone that way so in summary i hope that you can take away from this that gen z and millennials are different it's likely that they're going to demand technology integration but the relationships are important you can't just put lessons on video and walk away they still need us probably to help vet content and how to use what they learn they're gonna use outside sources it's gonna happen we're gonna have to figure out how to work with that and they're also gonna that feedback that work that intense or or uh voluminous feedback that tendency is going to continue they may prefer video and group work again as long as it's combined with an individual component so the good news is now you all have kind of a sampling of what's coming up here's the bad news there's another generation knocking at the door probably uh gen alpha is what they're being called these folks are actually being raised by uh older millennials and there's already some some information or summon uh data to show that they may even be different than gen z so as i mentioned earlier to when i talked about this today we're never done we're never done learning about the next crop of learners so with that i thank you and uh happy to happy to chat or have a answer questions thank you so much dr tomlin this was fabulous um yes we are never done i see that as a positive that we're always going to be learning about a new generation and um learning is what i think keeps us young and keeps us engaged i i throughout your talk i heard a lot of similar key concepts of what we have been knowing about adult learners for years and years um they want to link concepts to what is practical and that's where faculty members are always going to be involved always going to be engaged you can only have so much information that you can find on the internet they need that real time engagement um really providing and responding to feedback and it like i say in almost every session that we hold because they all connect to having a conversation with your learners there's always the conversation and never has it been um the case more than now um that that conversation the bi-directional learning is ever present so they're learning from us yes but we are learning so much from them talk to your learners find out what is meaningful for them um get out there and look google your um your content area google or see what's on youtube to see what they're learning because you know that they are out there doing that so you might as well see what they're doing and make those connections for them um so and i find that this was not only helpful in the medical education field but helpful for my own kid it's helpful for me working with uh my children as i'm a and many of us are part-time teachers in the evening now um when we're done with um with our regular jobs so i hope this was helpful to you as well if anybody has any questions please share them now um a couple of things popped up in the chat while we were going through dr dain said why do we have to accommodate to their learning and communic their communication preferences instead of asking them to accommodate to our preferences as a way to teach them to accommodate to their patients preferences that's one of the things this comes back to and i've tried to say this from the very beginning i don't think we have to in fact i think part one of the key our jobs is to teach people the climate of health profession right the culture of health profession and that comes with learning the norms and you learn norms through uh how we do business and that starts with education um and again i don't think you have to but i think i think that if you the value here for everything i just said is understanding where things are coming from and so for example if you have a and i did this with with my high school students i did with residents but while i was still a residency director applying some of these lessons if i had an initiative that i thought was super innovative and i put it out there and it just failed and believe me i have a i have a file cabinet full of notes on many of these such initiatives one of the first things that i would do is i'd step back and say what are these perspectives are you going back to what the what i think where the learners are coming from was there something there that i could have been doing better or differently using i don't say generational perspectives but using the perspectives of the learners a little better this is the fundamental teaching thing it goes beyond generations but i think that that to me is the most important thing i'm not wholesale saying that we should transform everything we do but i think um on having that understanding particularly if you're in a spot where there's conflict or friction it can help it can help and yes in large part some it like one of the surgeons once told me you could this is all fine and good they can watch youtube videos all day eventually they got to learn how to suture and you just you just got to do it and that's 100 true absolutely true thank you i know that it we're at time if those of you who need to go um please feel free to go um dr chairman are you okay to stay on a few minutes in case additional people have questions or concerns so if you've got to go go ahead if anybody wants to stay and ask questions please feel free to do so for the next few minutes enjoy your day oh and i hope to see you at five and six for our poster presentations and our award and recognition at six o'clock posters are at five for ward six let's see so so i have a question um and my question is how do those of us who um are definitely baby boomers um and and i i feel like i i try to stay abreast of new technology and everything but it's not my native world how how do i learn how to use all of this stuff so that i can and i don't have kids um so that i can incorporate it in my courses so a lesson from my own life um i i do use my children to teach me stuff but use your students too um this is something that that goes back i remember when when i'm old enough to remember when social media first came out i'm like i'm not going to use this what the heck is this i don't have anything to say that anybody wants to listen to but um i actually had the residence teach me about how best to use it what it could be used for so and so forth so it actually provides talk about bi-ter bi-directional communication bi-directional teaching it provides a way for them to actually have a little bit of leadership a little bit of investment um but that's honestly where i go now that being said i'm sure i'm sure institution is a lot like mine that we have voluminous faculty development resources and all sorts of people who all sorts of people who can help us get stuff set up to me that's the second step it's watching what people are doing i actually have a tendency when i'm uh when i'm doing small groups or even sometimes lecturing i'm a pacer i'm a wanderer i look at what people are doing i know it's maybe an invasion of privacy maybe i don't know but but but i'm watching again and i'm seeing what's open on their screens and uh and and i see them with the youtubers or see something up i just i keep track of that if i see a bunch of people doing that i might actually ask the question what what is that and get some information i might i say would you mind stepping staying after and showing me a little bit about this and then after i find out yeah this is being used i then go to my institutional people to teach me how to use it but that's what i do i don't know if that's the correct approach but i just try i try to spend as much time interacting with my learners at their level as i can just to know where they are and what they're doing at least i don't know if that but that that tends to be what i do i love that can you even imagine when sketchy micro first came out and um you're you're walking around the room and seeing a bunch of cartoons that your med students are nursing students or whomever um are looking at on their computer i mean that has to throw you off um but even just bringing i find that these learners love to teach they love to share what they know for one reason or another even if it's like hey let's get together for coffee of three or four kid students who um who could share with you some of the things that they're interested in that they uh would benefit from in the learning environment i think that would be helpful too yeah one of your colleagues of sporting actually brought up that raised a question and they said that they tend to they tend to teach old school um with a pen and paper in front of people and saying we're going to teach you about x concept write down on the paper everything you know and i think that was the gist of what you said if everyone correctly and he was asking well should i abandon that and i said no not by any means um i think that again that plays into it plays into uh technology is a tool it's not it's not the it's not the it's not the end-all be-all of everything and i think that again students students are happy to share what they're doing and especially if they think it's going to benefit not only them later but their classmates as well so i i use them all the time all the time so i teach 100 online all of my classes are completely online so walking around classroom isn't very good um but i do try to use a lot of youtube videos because i mean what else do you do online um social media i'm just not the least bit interested in social media and so that's a a challenge for me i i don't do facebook don't do snapchat don't do twitter and it depends on your life too like um some learners never would do twitter um or but some would uh you just have to really gauge who your learners are you know what they're and you don't have to necessarily be the one tweeting but i think that there are other people that you could guide to if you spoke with their colleagues about who to i don't know the correct twitter language but who to follow on twitter i think um you could do that and then there would be a bunch of information that they would receive as a reliable source that you've sort of looked into on your own because i'm sure you have colleagues that do what you do who are more interested in twitter or some social media so that could be a good um option too that's a good idea well and another thing to consider especially in the online environment you raise a good point um and i coming to think of it my typical practice i can't even do anymore because our pre-clinic i teach a lot in pre-clinical education realm and we're 90 virtual i don't have that that i used to is formally ask them as a part of their evaluation or as a part of this what outside resources were you using when you studied what what how did you study what did you use when you study and i found that students are very upfront they're they're happy to tell you about it and that's a good way to at least look at that well how gosh everybody seems to be using online you know the online discussion boards to go over class material that's actually something that's very interesting i might look into that now and see if i could do something or provide something in that arena to help them but don't be afraid to ask even if it's part of a formal evaluation or just uh informal and even if you notice one of your learners or a couple of your learners taken a particular interest in teaching you might have a graduate student who's interested in doing that um health professions education when they grow up so they may be interested in being an assistant to you either formally or informally um to sort of help guide the way other questions i really look forward to seeing you all at five o'clock for posters uh oral presentations and then six o'clock for the awards and recognition i hope you all have a wonderful rest of the day until then.