 Dr. Lauren Buhl
|
 Dr. Dante Cerza
|
The 2024 Spring Meeting of the Society for Education in Anesthesiology (SEA) in Philadelphia, April 19-21, was designed to bring together top minds in Education, Anesthesiology, and Cognitive Psychology, and thanks to a cadre of dynamic keynote speakers and the perennial willingness of SEA members to try something new, we think it was an overwhelming success. The theme “The Science of Learning” was chosen to shine a light on the basic and applied research in Cognitive Psychology and Neuroscience that underlies so many of our practical approaches to teaching and learning but is not always readily accessible to clinical educators. By bringing this work into the clinical realm through our SEA members, we hope it will inspire new practical approaches to teaching and learning and new avenues for anesthesia education research grounded in basic science.
Dr. Cynthia Nebel opened the meeting on Friday morning with her talk entitled “Effective Learning Strategies for Planning and Reinforcement of Learning” and returned in the afternoon for a follow-up talk, “Strategies for Development of Understanding.” She emphasized that effective learning doesn’t just happen but requires planning, and she introduced the concepts of spacing and interleaving. She also laid out strategies such as elaborative interrogation, concrete examples, and dual coding to help learners develop understanding, and discussed ways to apply retrieval practice to reinforce learning. For anyone who missed her talks or wants a refresher, learningscientists.org is a treasure trove of content from Dr. Nebel and her colleagues on these topics and many more.
Andrew Watson was our next outstanding keynote speaker with two sessions on The Science of Learning: Introducing Working Memory and Introducing Attention. He had attendees engage in several exercises to demonstrate that working memory has a finite capacity to select, hold, reorganize, and combine information, and encouraged us as educators to anticipate, recognize, and mitigate instances when this capacity is overloaded for our learners. He went on to describe the tripartite theory of attention - alertness, orienting, and executive attention - and discussed ways to help learners orient by increasing the salience of our teaching points and ways to promote executive attention by teaching within the limitations of working memory.
Dr. John Almorode rounded out our trio of keynote speakers from the broader world of education with two talks on Saturday entitled “How Learning Works: A Framework for Amplifying Our Impact” and “How Feedback Works and How to Leverage Feedback for Better Learning.” In these extremely dynamic and interactive sessions, he introduced the SOLO taxonomy to help educators understand where their students sit on the continuum of prestructural, unistructural, multistructural, relational, and extended abstract thinking and how to use this knowledge to choose the right teaching strategy at the right time. He also provided insights on how to use high information feedback that is given, received, and integrated to promote learning and how to avoid the various triggers that can get in the way of effective feedback.
Two additional highlights Saturday included a morning consensus session hosted by the Anesthesia Research Council on Charting the Future of Anesthesiology Education through Research, which allowed attendees to share their thoughts on where our focus and funding should be directed with regard to education research in anesthesiology, and the annual SEA-HVO Fellowship Presentation by Dr. Jo Davies and Dr. Odinakachukwu Ehie introducing the latest group of fellows. We are excited to hear about their experiences at future meetings. For the first time ever, Saturday featured the Idea Lab lunchtime breakout session, which allowed 22 (!) presenters the opportunity to share their nascent project ideas and receive feedback from expert moderators and session attendees. It is our great hope that this well-attended session will become a staple of future SEA meetings. We also heard oral presentations from the top three research abstracts and the top three curriculum abstracts in the morning and enjoyed a moderated poster session of a full slate of research and curriculum abstracts after lunch.
Sunday got off to a great start with a panel from the Simulation Assessment Research Group (SARG) led by Dr. Matthew Weinger on “Using Simulation and Cognitive Interviewing to Assess Physician Performance and Decision Making,” and Drs. Lara Zisblatt, Fei Chen, Rachel Moquin, Dawn Dillman, and Danielle Saab rounded out the meeting with a review of some of the best education research articles of the year, with an eye toward effective application of theory, providing several examples for attendees who want to incorporate more theory into their own work.
SEA meetings are never short on opportunities to socialize and network with others who are passionate about education, and Philadelphia provide ample opportunity with a host of amazing restaurants for the traditional dine-around on Friday night and a rare opportunity to attend an in-studio performance by BalletX, one of Philadelphia’s best loved dance companies. It was a truly special experience and a night we won’t soon forget. We would like to thank Dr. Kristin Ondecko-Ligda, Dr. Barbara Orlando, and the entire SEA Meeting Planning Committee for guiding us along the way. It was a truly enjoyable experience and resulted in a meeting we were so proud to share with all of the attendees.
Ready to test your knowledge? Take the SEA: 2024 Fall Newsletter: 2024 Spring Meeting Knowledge Check and challenge yourself and reinforce what you've learned!
