Dean's Report 2021: Teaching and Learning

Teaching and Learning

First-year MD student Sara Castro receives her white coat from Natasha Johnson, associate director of the William Bosworth Castle Society

The pandemic challenged faculty to pioneer new avenues for engagement, instruction, and collaboration In Harvard Medical School classrooms

and labs, the pandemic challenged faculty to pioneer new avenues for engagement, instruction, and collaboration. Meanwhile, at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, an $18 million renovation transformed two floors into interactive learning spaces to promote greater collaborative study and community-building.

Within the Program in Medical Education, the challenges of remote learning and pauses in clinical rotations drove pedagogical innovation. Faculty, for instance, rapidly created a five-module, multimodal, asynchronous telemedicine curriculum to teach students clinical skills, regulatory issues, professionalism, and innovations related to telemedicine.

Three affiliated hospitals collaborated on a virtual radiology core clerkship, which included flipped-classroom modules, largegroup didactic lectures, and small group activities, all emphasizing a patient-centered approach to clinical scenarios, proper imaging utilization, and patient safety.

A newly launched advanced integrated science course combines women’s health with LGBTQ health and covers sexual and gender fluidity. It looks at how sexual orientation affects health, health care, and health policy and explores how to conduct and critique biomedical research related to sex and gender.

HMS students continued to excel. Seven received Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, representing nearly a quarter of all Soros awards given at schools nationwide. The students’ research explores topics such as neuropsychiatric disease, health care delivery for underserved populations, and medical device innovation.

The Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology introduced a pilot for first-year students that unites clinical reasoning with scientific innovation. Students were guided by preclinical curriculum faculty through a clinical case that reinforced how foundational sciences intersect in the context of clinical care. Employing creativity and problem-solving, students identified points in a patient’s experience of illness to determine where innovation could improve treatments for future patients.

HMS remained the No. 1 ranked medical school for research and rose to No. 8 for primary care education by U.S. News & World Report, up from No. 10 last year.

Graduate Education programs grew significantly, with the shift to remote instruction making courses more accessible to a greater number of learners, including clinicians and midcareer professionals. Master’s program enrollments increased more than 62 percent in the past two years.

Next year, HMS will launch its ninth master’s degree concentration with a newly approved one-year master of science degree in media, medicine, and health.

To further promote diversity in these programs, the Dean’s Scholarships for HMS Master’s Students was established, with funds allocated for students with financial need or those from populations underrepresented in science and medicine. Funding this year provided 20 students with tuition discounts.

Significant progress was made in centralizing graduate student support services and developing new course evaluation technology. Advising for graduate student scientists was enhanced by mentorship training for faculty across PhD programs.

The Harvard Integrated Life Sciences

program, a network of all 14 Harvard life sciences PhD programs, now has its administrative home at HMS, allowing best practices to be efficiently shared.

The Office for External Education pivoted to deliver innovative educational opportunities, developing resources that address the current crisis and the future of health care. Global audiences, including clinicians and health care professionals, business leaders, pre-health career learners, patients, and families are increasingly turning to HMS for insights or professional growth opportunities.

One executive education program provided more than 460 health care leaders with the knowledge, tools, and strategies to design and implement technology-enabled change initiatives in health care. Another customized program was developed for 1,200 clinical development leaders at Boehringer Ingelheim.

To keep professionals current on medical science developments, three new HMX Pro courses were launched on topics such as genetic testing and sequencing; chronic inflammation, autoimmunity, and allergy; and drug delivery. Through a philanthropic gift, four medical schools in Tunisia now offer HMX Fundamentals courses.

New health publishing agreements were made with companies such as Google and Apple. Additionally, a new grant is funding a portal for people with autism who are transitioning into adulthood and will provide a full curriculum for physicians.

Continuing medical education credits were awarded to more than 300,000 clinicians worldwide. In its first year, a partnership with Egypt’s Ministry of Health and Population included 1,600 postgraduate certificate program learners and 15 master’s students in four HMS programs.

A COVID-19 clinical education video series, ongoing webinars focused on health disparities, and an accredited event for HMS alumni on mitigating implicit bias provided important insights for frontline clinicians while advancing HMS’ focus on diversity and inclusion. n