Handouts and Powerpoint from Curriculum Council 10/16/12

October 2012 Curriculum Council

• The .ppt slideshow we used at Curriculum Council

 

October Curriculum Council Handouts

• The 13-page Packet we used at Curriculum Council

 

Learning Teams 2 session 1 

• Sample agenda you can use for LT2Session1

A Lesson I’m Pretty Proud Of: Communication for Health Professionals

This week, I started a unit on Communication with my students.  Since they’re all a part of the Health Pathway at my school, we decided to focus on how important communication is to the future health professional. 

We’re also soon preparing to do a research paper so I wanted them to read some articles from scientific journals and understand how to tackle those. 

So we took some notes on communication.  Remember the communications model, English teachers, from your Mass Comm class?  And we talked about how scientists communicate their findings via journals so that other scientists can read them and build on our scientific knowledge. 

Then we talked about how important it is to communicate well in a hospital setting.  And there’s a surprising amount of literature on it.  So we used a couple articles to highlight the problem.

This one: “Medical Errors and Poor Communication” from CHEST:  http://journal.publications.chestnet.org/article.aspx?articleid=1087699  

And this one: “Interprofessional Communication and Medical Error: A Reframing of Research Questions and Approaches” from Academic Medicine:  http://journals.lww.com/academicmedicine/Fulltext/2008/10001/Interprofessional_Communication_and_Medical_Error_.19.aspx  

We read the first one together.  It’s much easier than the second one–an introduction to a whole issue of CHEST that talks about communication errors.  Students also discussed several incidents in their experience where errors in communication resulted in potential harm to their family members.  We used the first article to frame the problem of communication in hospitals. 

Then I let them loose on the second article to read with a partner or alone.  They were instructed to read it and mark the important parts and that we’d review it together.  There was a lot of moaning and complaining here as the second article is a little harder to understand. 

When we reconvened, I asked students to look at the first page and explain why they highlighted or marked something.  We were careful to look at transition words (and, secondly, however, therefore,. . . ) and see if those would give us a clue about the message the author was trying to communicate to us.

The article talks about Activity Theory and Knotworking Theory to help explain how communication can be improved in the workplace. 

Next students will draw their own model of how communication works.  We’ll learn how to cite sources when using an article like these.  And we’ll start planning our own papers about our Capstone Projects. 

Teacher’s Journals/Anecdotal Records/Scientific Observations

I was reminded this week about journaling as a teacher.  I keep a private journal and from time to time I have kept paper and digital anecdotal records of events in my classroom.  One think I liked about digital records is that it’s very easy to search for a kid’s name and sort entries by the kid’s name and see if there are any patterns. 

My undergrad is a Bachelor of Science in Education. When I received that degree, I thought the word “science” was funny because teaching seemed more artful than scientific to me.  But journaling is a way to look at patterns more scientifically.  Keeping the stats.  Making the discoveries. 

Setting the Theme

This year, my teaching partner is Sharon.  She teaches the same kids I have.  I teach 11th and 12th grade English and she teaches our Health Pathway.  Our students are health professionals of the future. 

Her classes have a very prescribed plan of what needs to be covered.  Diabetes, Heart Attack, Hypercholesterolemia, . . .These are the names of her units.  I have a little more flexibility.  So I’ve chosen to use her units as themes for my class.  My class can explore the topics from a more global point of view.  Perhaps the point of view of a reader, a writer, a poet.  My hope is that these guiding questions might inspire these future health professionals to think about the big picture.  Sharon teaches the how.  Maybe I can teach the why. 

So my units will be something like this:

Unit One: Human Body Systems

The Mystery (22 days)

What is the evidence?  How can we know something?  How can we prove something? What’s the difference between knowing and feeling?    How does this impact our health?

 

Unit Two: Heart Attack

Heart Attack (29 days)

What is the human heart in literature?  What does it mean to “have heart”?  What happens when our passions are at odds with our duties?  How does this impact our health?

 

Unit Three: Diabetes

Diabetes: (41 days)

Is Diabetes a preventable illness?  Why do we make the food choices we make?  How do we get our food?  Is food an art or a science?  Why do we eat the way we do?  How can future health professionals encourage good choices?  Is it possible to make someone do what is good for them?  Why do some people choose not to comply with medical advice?  How does this impact our health?

 

Unit 4: Sickle Cell Disease

Sickle Cell Disease (38 days)

How is health care provided in the United States and in the world?  Is this system fair?  What would be the best way to improve health and health care in our country and city?  How do race, gender, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, education, access to food, homelessness, and insurance or other factors impact our delivery of health care? 

 

Unit 5: Hypercholesterolemia

Cholesterol (11 days)

Which is more important–Nature or Nurture?  Are we what we have always been or can we change?  Does our family determine our future? 

 

Unit 6: Infectious Diseases

Bacteria/Viruses/Public Health (17 days)

What has the AIDS Crisis taught us about public health?  What are we afraid of in delivery of health care? 

 

Unit 7: Medical Interventions

Medical Interventions (13 days)

How are medicines developed and tested?  Why are pharmaceuticals so costly?  Is there a way to make sure that everyone can afford the medicines they need? 

Curiosity. . .Launched and landed.

Watching the landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars was beautiful to me but I didn’t actually watch the landing.  Honestly, space travel doesn’t intrigue me much.  It was beautiful to see the reaction–joy, relief, tears, laughter–that the space travel ignited in the scientists. The investment that these people (mostly men) put in science has paid off and they are  proud and amazed.

I’m curious about something.  This year I’ll be teaching 11th and 12th grade English to students in a health professions program at an urban STEM high school.  What is the role of the English Teacher at a STEM high school?  It’s a tough line to walk.  The kids attracted to STEM are not necessarily the kids who are attracted to the language arts.  What place does poetry and creative writing have in a Common Core curriculum that emphasizes non-fiction over fiction? How can English teachers (mostly women) support students in their pursuit of the STEM fields?

I want this blog to be a place where I explore my attempts to answer these questions. I’m curious.