Jellybean 95 With Salim Rezaie

Teaching teachers about teaching; lets get super-meta.

The Teaching Course. It’s in Alcatraz, Brisbane and Copenhagen. It’s in Melbourne, Manchester and Manila. I’d be exhausted just thinking about it if it didn’t sound like so much fun.

Salim Rezaie is a softly spoken, erudite, talented attention avoider. He want’s to credit someone else, he wants you to be happy, he wants to perfect the next slide for his next talk. He doesn’t want to give his next talk quite as much as make the slides but we, the consumers of his inimitable style, are not complaining. Instead we are signed up subscribers, following and forwarding his work because it’s good, very good.

Salim is a bit of a pro. He started out on ALIEM. He started RebelEM as a blog and then he got a podcast up and running. He got into this whole education thing, the #FOAMed thing, and from his involvement he became increasingly interested in the processes of the whole teaching/training/learning/simulating/feedback thing. So much so that he realised that there was an appetite, a need, for a resource that helps teachers get better at teaching. So we are educators, we are motivated, we know some stuff, but we are often isolated within our various institutions as the education woman or man. We don’t have our own little cadre of education enthusiasts close by to ask for help, to compare notes, to share techniques.

So Salim set one up. He formed a team. He is the leader but he is an incredibly modern type of super-collaborative empathic leader. He is soaking up ideas from all sources. He has gathered a group of super-impressive women and men that help him out. Let’s think for a second about the Teaching Course Faculty. To shed light on this lets bring in my resident philosophical conundrum machine; Cormac.

My son Cormac asks me some very important questions. Last week he asked me a good zombie apocolypse question; “Come the Zombie Apocolypse which of your friends would you bring along to help you survive?” That is an interesting question, it is a thought experiment in utilitarian ethics.

I’d suggest there are a few candidates in the Teaching Course faculty;

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Of course one would have to get into the whole #MetaMoments thing that The Teaching Course is embracing, that means feedback, lots of feedback. The imagined “Flipping MedEd Zombie Apocalypse Survival Team” would be giving and receiving lots of feedback. There would be lots of eye contact and hugs. Hopefully not too much to distract them from the zombies which would give the wrong sort of feed back altogether.

“Whats that noise? Feedback! I hate feedback. No, wait, hang on, I love feedback.” Neil Young.

It is a love hate thing for many of us, but then have you ever been taught how to take feedback? Give it, maybe, but take it? We can tease ourselves for being a bit meta about all this stuff but there is a reason we are talking about it. If we are mentoring young nurses and doctors, if we are running simulation sessions, (and we are), then we do need to think about all this and more.

The Teaching Course is a constantly evolving set of distinct and imaginative units. There’s a presenting skills, simulations skills, there’s mindfulness stuff, there’s an awful lot in there. If you are an educator then this course is definitely worth a look. It is so good you may wish to go more than once.

I would. I’d go just to get more down-to-earth wisdom from probably my favourite Texan. (Apologies to Cordell Walker.)

Accidental old fashioned sage and reluctant FOAMed star, it’s Salim Rezaie @srrezaie

Check out these Jellybean Podcasts with other Teaching Course Faculty;

Victoria Brazil

Natalie May

Simon Carley

Jesse Spur

Chris Nixon

Liz Crowe

Ashley Liebig

Chris Hicks

Kat Evans

Andy Tagg

Mads Astvad

Sandra Viggers

Paul Grinzi

Ross Fisher

Julie Derrenger

Salim Rezaie

It’s like a Jellybean Playlist. I might go and build that Playlist on SoundCloud.