Motivating medical students to learn teamwork skills

Figures & data

Table

Practice points

Teamwork skills are important for medical students in PBL-tutorial sessions and in health-care teams. Team members’ ability to work and learn effectively together depends a great deal on the quality of their verbal communication. Medical students’ motivation to learn teamwork skills increases if they concretely understand why the topic is clinically relevant and how they can make use of it in the future as physicians. Teachers of teamwork skills and other multidisciplinary topics should assist medical students to appreciate the clinical relevance of these topics. A model for a training session aimed at improving medical students’ verbal communication is presented.

Table 1.  Structure of the teamwork skills module

Introduction

Short lecture: Communication in a team. Forms of conversation (discussion, debate, dialogue (emphasized in the first year)) and elements of conversation (attitude toward others, listening skills, question styles, finding key points in communication (emphasized in the second and third years)).

Exercise 1 (Pairs). Story. Pairs create a story together, adding just one word per turn.

Aim: To understand how words represent individual thought processes which may be difficult for the other to understand.

Exercise 2 (Pairs). Listen and repeat. A student tells the his/her partner why he/she wants to become a physician. The partner listens and repeats word for word what the speaker has said.

Aim: To understand that active listening requires effort and concentration.

Exercise 3 (Pairs). Listen and paraphrase. A student tells his/her partner what he/she is expecting from the medical studies. The partner listens and paraphrases what the speaker has said.

Aim: To understand the meaning of effective listening and the role of interpretation in understanding each other.

Short lecture: Elements of effective verbal communication. The role of mutual respect, equal participation, comments that focus on the topic/task, active listening, keywords and sentences, asking questions, and handling conflicts about knowledge in gaining deeper understanding of each other and the topic.

Exercise 4 (Groups of 4). Recoqnizing keywords and sentences. A student tells a group his/her ideas about the major challenges in medicine. The rest of the group listens and writes down key words and sentences from the speech. After a while the group compares the keywords and sentences they have chosen. For example: It is important to guarantee patient safety. Possible keywords: guarantee patient safety

Aim: To learn how to recognize key points in verbal communication which need more clarification.

Short lecture: Asking questions. The role of question styles (open, closed, critical, verification) in gaining deeper understanding of each other and the topic or checking understanding. For example: What does guaranteeing patient safety mean? (Open question).

Exercise 5 (Groups of 4). Identifying keywords/sentences and form a question about it. A student tells his/her understanding about the idea and purpose of cell division. His/her partner listens and selects keywords/sentences and forms questions that aim to deepen the understanding of the other's ideas. After a couple of questions, they change roles. The rest of the group observes and evaluates how well the questions seemed to deepen their understanding of the speakers’ thoughts.

Aim: To learn to identify key points in communication and form relevant questions which help to deepen understanding of these points.

Exercise 6 (Groups of 4). Improving PBL-tutorial sessions. The group discusses how they can improve their PBL-tutorial sessions with these elements of effective verbal communication.

Aim: To reflect on what is learned and how to apply it in practice.

Figure 1. Students’ perceptions of the usefulness of the teamwork skills module in the years 1 (n = 81), 2 (n = 99), and 3 (n = 95); percentages of the students’ answers to the statement ‘Teamwork skills module was useful’.