Sue Goldie makes use of outside-the-box educating methods to offer college students a agency grasp of a sprawling discipline
January 29, 2021 – Coloured markers, a sketch pad, and a hearty dose of enthusiasm are among the important instruments that Sue Goldie brings to her very talked-about introductory public well being course.
Goldie, Roger Irving Lee Professor of Public Well being and director of the Center for Health Decision Science (CHDS) at Harvard T.H. Chan College of Public Well being, is obsessed with giving each pupil a strong basis within the ideas and science of public well being. She developed the primary iteration of the course 5 years in the past with Dean Julio Frenk with a purpose to present incoming college students—who arrive on the College with a range of academic, cultural, {and professional} experiences—with a standard conceptual framework for fascinated by public well being. That course passed off over three days throughout fall orientation, however two years in the past Goldie created a extra complete course, structured by means of self-paced on-line multimedia modules that college students take the summer season earlier than starting their diploma packages.
Goldie cares so much about pedagogy—which is the place the markers and sketch pad are available. Within the Foundations course, she focuses not simply on the nuts and bolts of public well being, but in addition on educating it in the simplest approach attainable. For the latter aim, she attracts on her six years as college director of the Global Health Education and Learning Incubator at Harvard University (GHELI), a job that has put her on the forefront of creating new pedagogical instruments and educational methods.
“This course is particular to me not solely as a result of I’m dedicated to making sure each pupil is supplied with the general public well being ideas and literacies to achieve success of their graduate research, but in addition as a result of the course is a laboratory for a way we will design and combine multimodal studying experiences into standard curricula,” mentioned Goldie.
Based on Nancy Turnbull, senior affiliate dean for academic packages, the course’s secret sauce could be Goldie herself. “Sue is broadly acknowledged as probably the most extraordinary academics within the College,” mentioned Turnbull. “I feel she’s passionate and good, and an modern educator. You would not have picked anyone higher to show the course.”
Onscreen, Goldie is vibrant, frank, and private in her supply. On the outset, she shares her personal circuitous path to drugs after which to public well being. “My past love,” she admits, “was martial arts.” She encourages college students to embrace “being a pupil” and reassures them that it’s okay to not know precisely how their diploma will affect their profession paths.
Allie Liss, an MPH pupil in well being coverage, admits that when she first heard concerning the timing of the Foundations course, she was lower than thrilled. “My first thought was, ‘Actually? In the midst of a pandemic? You simply advised me I’ve on-line lessons and now you’re making me do one over the summer season?’”
However that feeling didn’t final lengthy as a result of Liss discovered the course so attention-grabbing and fascinating. “Not wanting to show the category off was positively a difficulty,” she mentioned. “Generally I’d assume, ‘I want I might spend 10 extra minutes listening to the following lesson.’”
Different college students have been additionally shocked by how a lot they loved the course. “Regardless that the course wasn’t stay, it felt that approach as a result of it was so partaking,” mentioned Caroline Shannon, an architect who’s incomes an MPH in well being and social conduct. “It turned the nightly leisure for some time this summer season in our home.”
Constructing a basis—with pleasure
Earlier than the creation of the Foundations course, “the one widespread educational expertise that college students on the College shared was a requirement to take biostatistics and epidemiology,” mentioned Turnbull. “These are clearly very foundational disciplines to public well being, however it was attainable, relying on what program you have been in, to graduate from the college with a really incomplete image of public well being.”
When the course was first provided in 2015, Frenk had already left the College to develop into president of the College of Miami. However he returned that 12 months to show it alongside Goldie. She and Frenk taught that first course in Kresge Cafeteria throughout orientation, over three mornings, in two sections of roughly 200 college students every. “Julio and I ran round like speak present hosts,” mentioned Goldie. “It was hysterical. Each desk had markers, paper, pads.”
Goldie felt that compressing materials into three days throughout orientation week was not pedagogically one of the best ways to study. She expanded the curriculum to fulfill new accreditation necessities and construct a course structure that would offer college students with extra help and adaptability. Working together with her groups at GHELI and CHDS, she designed, pilot-tested, and refined multimedia that might not solely be pedagogically efficient, however that might create an open and inclusive studying surroundings. College students now full 4 on-line modules asynchronously over the course of the summer season, adopted by an in-person part after they arrive within the fall (final 12 months that session was digital as a result of pandemic).
The course presents info in 10- to 15-minute chunks and contains Goldie’s signature colourful sketches, that includes phrases, numbers, easy drawings of individuals, animals, viruses, autos, cities, and extra. Goldie begins with the fundamentals, asking college students to contemplate how they might outline well being, public well being, and world well being. She explains that public well being adopts a population-level evaluation, has underlying ideas and values, and requires an interdisciplinary strategy. She challenges college students to contemplate the interconnections between biology, inhabitants, society, and the surroundings.
“One of many options of our discipline is that we don’t simply establish the issues and examine them,” she tells the scholars. “We additionally ask, ‘How can we reply to them?’”
Goldie emphasizes that understanding public well being challenges requires consideration of each well being situations (ailments, accidents, and physiologic states like being pregnant, and many others.) and the “situations” for well being (social, financial, political, and environmental components that affect well being). To assist college students visualize these tightly linked ideas, she attracts a diagonal line bisecting a rectangle, with one of many triangular sections representing “well being situations” and the opposite representing “situations for well being.” Mentioned Shannon, “Having a diagram that clarifies the idea is so highly effective. The picture of the diagram retains me from having to memorize issues.”
Russell Simons, who’s engaged on each an MPH in well being coverage at Harvard Chan College and an MD on the College of Chicago, mentioned that Goldie discovered an extremely accessible strategy to get throughout the tough-to-grasp idea of “disability-adjusted life years,” or “DALYs”—a inhabitants measure that captures each morbidity and mortality. For instance the idea, Goldie sketches a line representing the timeline from start to loss of life in a rustic with the best life expectancy on the planet. She overlays a easy narrative instance, monitoring an individual over the course of their life, describing an unlucky taxi accident at age 37, leading to a number of years of incapacity, after which a deadly coronary heart assault at age 65. She identifies two zones on the illustration: the years of wholesome life misplaced as a result of incapacity (YLDs) after the accident, and the years of life misplaced as a result of untimely mortality (YLLs) from the center assault. As soon as college students grasp that these are the 2 major parts of DALYs, and that they characterize the “hole” between the most effective international locations can obtain and what’s truly achieved, she discusses the strategies and assumptions behind the idea.
Goldie finds that drawing sketches is rather more efficient than merely speaking a couple of idea. “Individuals study higher from phrases and photos than from phrases alone,” she explains. “We now have separate channels in our brains for visible and verbal info, and each have limits on how a lot could be processed at one time.” She says conceptual diagrams assist college students manage materials right into a coherent construction, whereas the method of drawing permits for info to be offered piece by piece, avoiding what’s known as “cognitive overload,” which may impede studying. She encourages college students to take notes in an identical approach, sketching alongside together with her. “Along with being according to the science of how we study, I feel that the upbeat design of our studio classroom places college students in a unique mindset,” she says, including, “I discover folks smile much more when we have now colourful markers out.”
Reaching out
Goldie says it may be difficult to achieve college students from a variety of backgrounds—they could possibly be physicians or current faculty graduates, journalists or architects. “How do you discover a strategy to invite that whole heterogeneous neighborhood into your room and make sure that every certainly one of them is ready to meaningfully have interaction with the content material?” she asks. “It’s powerful to do.”
The pandemic solely made it more durable. To supply context to current course movies, Goldie recorded greater than two dozen extra movies final spring, a lot of which drew from the well being disaster unfolding in actual time. “Making an attempt to leverage what’s actual in your on a regular basis life and what’s most salient to you is likely one of the only methods for somebody to study,” she mentioned. She jury-rigged a house studio by inserting an iPad in entrance of her, to movie her talking, and mounting her iPhone overhead, to seize her drawing. She is fast to credit score her employees at each GHELI and the CHDS Media Hub, the place experimentation and prototyping of pedagogical instruments is the every day work. “The pandemic is a stark instance of why ongoing innovation and pedagogical experimentation within the digital area is so necessary,” she says.
For Goldie, the Foundations course is a piece in progress. She lately accomplished a collection of movies on pandemic danger and is engaged on new supplies specializing in local weather, surroundings, and well being for the summer season 2021 model of the course. As well as, Goldie is contemplating a variety of course fashions during which alternatives for engagement might proceed throughout the educational 12 months. Even now, the “classroom” portal inside Canvas—the web platform the place Harvard Chan college students can entry their course web sites—supplies an entire host of assets curated for college students to make use of all 12 months, starting from glossaries and tip sheets to useful resource packs from the GHELI repository.
Goldie was dissatisfied that she didn’t have an opportunity to fulfill her college students in particular person this fall. Whereas she admits that it’s laborious to recreate the vitality of a dynamic classroom in an internet surroundings, she insists that college must be striving to create digital “studying areas” that promote social connection with out bodily presence. “When I’m educating on-line, I think about I’m having a dialog with a bunch of three college students in my workplace sitting throughout the desk—that’s the educational surroundings I’m attempting to create,” she says. “Once I speak to the scholars, I need them to really feel I’m current, and that I’m talking with them from the center.”
pictures courtesy Sue Goldie
