PBL Tutor Training - Playing Med-Student

Today I had my first of two PBL Tutor Training workshops. What are PBL tutor training workshops you might ask? Well, the Med school at UBC teaches their undergraduate med students using PBL (problem based learning). The students are put into PBL groups (around 7 students), and they are given a tutor whose job is to facilitate the learning process of the students in the PBL group. The tutor's role is not to teach, but to give direction - to aid the student's own learning. These PBL tutors may be physicians, instructors, or researchers, and they need to be trained on how to tutor the PBL tutorial. In order to train these tutors, they need mock med-school students. That's where I came in. They asked students in the pre-med/pre-dental club to come and help the Faculty of Medicine train their PBL tutors. It involes 1 hr of training, 6 hrs of tutorial (split over two sessions), and approximately 1-2hrs of independent study between tutorial one and two. For all this I get $100. Not too shabby, if I can say so myself.
So, as I mentioned, today I had my first session. The problem we were given was about a man in the ER who had just been in a motor vehicle accident. He was having trouble breathing, and the problem seemed to be focused on his left chest. All we did was work through the problem, taking the information we were given, trying to figure out what the learning issues were (things which we needed to go and learn/research), formulating a hypothesis, and asking what further information could we use. We made it half way through the case (page 2 of 3). So now we've been sent off to study up for the Thursday session. I really like this PBL system of learning: whenever I take responsibility for my own learning, I find that I actually learn and understand material, as opposed to passive listening in lectures or passive reading. This is also a nice taste of what preclerkship at most med schools will be like; as far as I know all the major Canadian medical schools have gone to the problem-based learning method. All in all, well worth it. And did I say a hundred bucks=]

Oh, and my money is down on pneumothorax - collapsed lung. However, as the training told us, the point of these PBL sessions is to lead students to study the physiology and anatomy of the system(s) involved. The clinical aspect is nice, but not the real focus. But still, my money is down.

Cheers for now,
Afra