"Which way to the New Pathway Project?"
The receptionist in the imposing lobby at Brigham and Woman's Hospital responded, '''New' what?...You mean Neurophysiology?"
Apparently, though it is right under their noses, not everyone at Harvard Medical School is aware of the experimental education program, or New Pathway, making its debut on campus this fall. After three years of planning, the program has opened its doors to its first cadre of students.
Educators like Dr. Daniel C. Losteson 'c44, dean of the Medical School, and Dr. Gordon T. Moore, director of the New Pathway, designed the Oliver Wendell Holmes Society--as the program has been dubbed--in response to an information explosion in modern medicine.
Quite simply, medical experts say, the amount of basic data pertaining to the study, treatment, and cure of disease is expanding so rapidly that no one can master it all, or even try.
So the emphasis has shifted, from quantity to quality. Instead of packing facts into their brains during long hours in large lecture halls, New Pathway students are learning problem-solving methods in small tutorials. In place of sitting alongside their 165 classmates, all absorbing material like dialysis bags, the New Pathway students are beginning to gain clinical experience. They may--if the program works--become better doctors as a result.
Quick Start
The 24 first-year Med School students who are the New Pathway's first-year guinea pigs began their studies immediately confronted with clinical cases--from acne to appendicitis--as the context for learning basic medical principles. Prompted to ask the right questions instead of memorizing the right answers, students in the six-person tutorials that form the core of the program have responded enthusiastically, taking charge of their own learning.
It is the students in Dr. Daniel A. Goodenough's tutorial who ask the questions, come up with hypotheses, and decide what they need to learn. Both the students and Goodenough, who was in charge of designing the first eight-week tutorial unit on anatomy, play active roles. Yet it is the students who most often answer each other's questions, and question each other's answers.
According to students Richard Goldstein and Lori Kaplowitz '85, the hour-long morning tutorial is only the start of a schedule that each day includes lectures, labs, and afternoon sessions in clinical care. Somewhere between case studies, lab benches, and figuring out how to give a physical; students must find time to independently research the problems they raised in the tutorial session.
Student Marc Silver said the small group format motivates him to do the homework it takes to be prepared: during tutorial, ignorance as well as knowledge is on display. "Ignorance," he said, "gets depressing after a while."
Aside from occasional soul-searching lapses, the New Pathway approach breeds confidence, its participants say. Without the imposing expertise of a professor, students don't hesitate to throw out their own ideas, guesses, questions.
Though they don't sport long white coats and M.D. badges, the students observed in one recent tutorial session resembled a conference of doctors brainstorming over a cutting-edge clinical problem. Since Goodenough doesn't often volunteer the answers, students appear to confront the clinical and basic science issues as if those issues had never before been discovered, addressed, answered, and summarily entombed in a textbook.
The New Pathway classroom resembles the laboratory of a research group. Students, not the teacher, write on the blackboard. Debate--something previously absent from the first-year curriculum--is encouraged.
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