Overview
Physician Associate students at Yale are required to complete a thesis project in order to graduate. There is a required, year-long research class that equips students with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to be successful in this endeavor.
Audience
Physician Associate students come from a range of educational, occupational, and demographic backgrounds. They are generally competent users of technology.
Design and deployment
Over the course of a year, I lead four sessions for the entire 40 student cohort and facilitate two rounds of six small group workshops. Over the years, they have taken place both in person and on Zoom.
Many of the sessions have required pre-work to gauge student ability and confidence, as well as remind them of skills attained in the previous sessions. The sessions with the entire class feature polling, individual, and group activities to maintain engagement. The small group workshops alternate between mini lectures and structured activity time to have students walk away with concrete progress on their thesis projects. Every session is followed by a program-administered satisfaction survey and at the end of the year, there is a skills assessment.
For learning objectives, prework, and session outlines, head to the series outline. Within that document, there are links to the prework experiences, in-class activities built out in Google Forms, and more. This slide deck is representative of the visual style and tone throughout the series.
Collaboration with subject matter expert
This series lives within a year-long course taught by faculty. I work with the professor to ensure that the examples within the sessions are highly relevant to what students are learning elsewhere in the curriculum at that moment. She shares her presentation materials on related topics so we can synchronize langauge for shared concepts. We have presented on our work together at Yale Medical Education Day and the national Physician Assistant Education Association annual meeting.