Mark is a Professor of Family and Community Medicine at Penn State University as well as an academic researcher and working family physician. His classes, which became the curriculum after a successful pilot run, abandon the classical lecture format and instead are completely based around experiential learning. Students work clinical shifts and then have inter-class discussions on diagnoses and treatments. When not in the classroom, Mark is also practicing as a family physician within the Penn State health system as well as researching the positive effect of the development of self-identity on career exploration and development.
Transcript
My name is Mark Stephens and I'm currently a professor of Family and Community Medicine here at Penn State University Park at the new regional campus of Penn State College of Medicine. Medicine, historically, there are three general areas where you could focus. You can focus on clinical care, patient care, you can focus on education, and you can focus on research. Here in my current job, I do a little bit of all three, so everyday is a mixture of seeing patients, teaching students, and conducting research. My own personal area of research is something that's called professional identity formation. In other words, medical students show up on day one, perhaps having seen a TV show about what a doctor is, or looks like, or does, but there's really no explicit guidance in terms of what does it mean to think, act, and feel like a physician. It's an iterative process and so I use a combination of art to examine processes of professional identity formation in medical students, and we're branching out now to artists and engineers, so, it's really wonderful, collaborative work. We sent third and fourth students up here for their clinical experience, and it went so well that the university has expanded it now to a full four-year curriculum. And the most exciting part about it is we've designed a medical school without a single lecture. Everything we do is based on student experience with real patients. It's extraordinarily exciting and fun to be a part of. So, the way we structure the curriculum is we have 12 total students here and we've divided them into two groups, and one of us takes responsibility for each of those two groups. And the students will go to clinic, three, two to three half days a week and take notes on patients they've seen. They met Bob who has diabetes and heart disease, they met Susan who is recovering from breast cancer, as an example. Then they will bring those patient narratives to class on Monday, and all six of them will present a narrative of a patient they met the previous week. I'm a family physician but we have internists, or internal medicine physicians, neurologists, we have physicians and, we have Allied Health Professionals on our team as well, physician assistants, nurse practitioners, so we're an inter-professional team. My flavor just happens to be family medicine. 30% of my time is based on patient care, and so three half-days a week, I'm actually at the College of Nursing here on campus. There's a new clinic down there for faculty, and it's a walk-in clinic and again, that's much like our teaching, is you never know what's gonna to come through the door, and that's kind of why, not kind of, it is why I chose family medicine, is the breadth of the discipline, and every patient brings something different to the table. I, personally, really, really enjoy that.
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