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The student preparation piece when they come to class in the
anatomy class that I teach. It’s an human anatomy class. There’s
two classes actually, one in the fall and one in the winter with
different topics, but there is a course philosophy and design that
really carries across both classes. And the unique piece that the
students do we give it a title called the student’s External Brain.
The reason for that title is a computer has an external hard drive,
right, and that way it can do things that it wouldn’t have been able to
do without that external memory. And so, I use that analogy, and so the
students have their External Brain. They have their internal brain, that
is hopefully working all the time, but then they have an External Brain
that they’re creating and basically it’s their own opportunity to document
their learning, create knowledge of anatomy through pictures, through
words, through stories, through analogies. Whatever they need to learn
they create in this document and we call it their External Brain. I think
the students call it their E.B. ‘cause that’s the hip way to talk about it in
the class I see. So they’re teaching me.
So when students are working on their External Brain there is a lot of
openness in terms of how they attack that project because that has to
do with them as a learner. Some people are very visual; therefore I
would encourage and expect that their External Brain has many images
in it. Others find that they’re really more word focused and that images
don’t get them as far as they need. They need descriptors that are in
a narrative. And so I encourage those students to use a lot of words
in their External Brain. So really, I find that each student needs to know
what content to put in it, but they need to do that in whatever way that
works best for them. And so, that’s a big cornerstone piece of the whole
class. Every single class period, a portion or a chapter, their External
Brain is due and that carries them with the content of the day.
And so, for example, if we’re in the fall, talking about muscular-skeletal
anatomy, we’re talking about the upper extremity in the shoulder, then
that day, before they’ve come to class, they’ve put together content
related to the shoulder. And I give them outlines about what the
content should be. I just try to leave it very open in terms of how they
should put together their content. So there is sort of a balance
between openness for students to fit themselves into the project
and also direction from me to help them make sure that they’re
still getting all the information gathered that they want to gather.
So a student will come in and they’ll have their External Brain in
front of them and then at that point we can begin our application
or clarification or discussion of the content of the day. And I can
ask them questions because they already have many of the answers
ready to go. And that way we can give them a chance to find out did
they collect the right information and have they constructed the
knowledge in such a way that the concepts they’re building are
accurate and making sense. So, they have that chance in class
to verify what they’ve put together and feel good about it. We do that
through lots of interactive questions and we use clickers and other
devices to kind of help students engage with that process. But
fundamentally, they show up with a lot of information and a lot of
content knowledge already in their hands.