As I participate in conversations with faculty in CHM, I am struck by the wisdom that each of you hold. As you plan and teach, you bring knowledge from a variety of perspectives and settings. You certainly bring a " wisdom of practice" to your role as an educator. I often consider how I use experience as a teaching tool rather than making an assumption that when I share an experience, that sharing in itself is promoting learning in a useful way. 

Lee Shulman, an influential scholar who once held a joint appointment in OMERAD and the College of Education, wrote about the wisdom of practice in medicine and teaching. Shulman argues that we assume that those who practice in a profession develop a level of "skilled performance" that comes from experience. But does having more experience always mean that we develop more skill? Did we develop this skill through repeated exposure or did we develop this skill through repeated exposure coupled with reflection on habits that were being internalized? How were we assisted by an expert to analyze our developing expertise? Because we gain wisdom from experience, does that necessarily mean that we know how to use that wisdom to teach others? Or do we believe that merely telling students of our experiences, that the telling in itself automatically becomes a learning experience? 

Through classroom and clinical learning experiences, we are trying to foster in our students the ability to develop practical reasoning--the link between judgment and action. Practical judgment ends with a choice, an action. Indeed, we each have developed a way that we approach complicated cases in our practice. But do we necessarily reflect on how we learned to reason through a complicated case in order to draw conclusions, and how your own teachers helped you internalize key ideas to consider when reasoning in the moment? In order to bring this wisdom of practice to bear fruit in preparing future physicians, it is critical that we are able to untangle what we do and how we do it to create teaching moments in our practice. 

Using your wisdom of practice as a teaching tool: While you are planning and teaching, consider ways to use your wisdom of practice to promote learning. 

Question to consider while you plan (related to wisdom of practice)

How can I use my experience as one example to consider among alternatives as I pose questions related to this topic?

Question to consider while you teach (related to wisdom of practice)

How can I talk through my decision-making process and reasoning about a specific situation to help students learn from my example from practice?

Reference: Shulman, L. (2004). The wisdom of practice: Essays on teaching, learning and learning to teach. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass.