Educator-to-Educator Tips & Strategies
Find out how your peers are making the most of Aquifer cases and teaching tools.
Teaching Perspectives & Pearls Blog
Virtual Peer Teaching with Aquifer
Karen McDonough, MD & Jeanne Cawse Lucas, MD
Student Experience: Bridging the Gap Between Coursework and Patient Care
Georgia Vasilakis, MD Candidate, Class of 2022
Building a Core Clinical Virtual Integrated Curriculum
Stacey Rose, MD & Nadia Ismail, MD
Blog Tag: M2
Blogs Archive
April 23, 2020 |
Meeting LCME Standards with Aquifer
June 30, 2022 |
Students provide consistently high rankings for Aquifer as reported in our five-star rating feedback data, but how and when cases are integrated into the curriculum can have a significant impact on their learning. Find out what themes emerged when we ask students what methods are most effective–and discover practical tips for assigning Aquifer cases based on student feedback.
What Students are Saying: Social Determinants of Health Cases
January 11, 2022 |
Students provide consistently high rankings for Aquifer as reported in our five-star rating feedback data, but how and when cases are integrated into the curriculum can have a significant impact on their learning. Find out what themes emerged when we ask students what methods are most effective–and discover practical tips for assigning Aquifer cases based on student feedback.
Start Small: Six Activities to Get Started Integrating Basic Science and Clinical Learning
November 17, 2021 | Integrating Basic Science
WISE-OnCall is used by programs across medical and health professions education to help learners diagnose and manage clinical situations they are likely to encounter on clinical clerkships, advanced sub-internships, and during the transition to residency or practice. Here are some successful integration strategies that we’ve heard from faculty users…
4 Ways to Use Aquifer High Value Care Across Your Curriculum
June 14, 2021 | Clinical Skills, Exploring Our Content
Aquifer High Value Care, a free course available to all … Read more
Using Integrated Illness Scripts: Three Integration Stories
May 27, 2021 | Integrating Basic Science
WISE-OnCall is used by programs across medical and health professions education to help learners diagnose and manage clinical situations they are likely to encounter on clinical clerkships, advanced sub-internships, and during the transition to residency or practice. Here are some successful integration strategies that we’ve heard from faculty users…
Remediation Part 2: Success Stories & Structures
May 12, 2021 | Remediation
We all know that every student will have a slightly different experience in each of their supervised clinical practice experiences (SCPEs). At our program, we’ve been using Aquifer cases to augment learning, build key communication skills, and supplement clinical experiences to meet ARC-PA standards.
Remediation Part 1: Aquifer Tools & Strategies
April 28, 2021 | Remediation
We all know that every student will have a slightly different experience in each of their supervised clinical practice experiences (SCPEs). At our program, we’ve been using Aquifer cases to augment learning, build key communication skills, and supplement clinical experiences to meet ARC-PA standards.
Building on Basic Science: Integrated Illness Scripts as a Foundational Boundary-Crossing Curricular Tool
April 13, 2021 | Integrating Basic Science
WISE-OnCall is used by programs across medical and health professions education to help learners diagnose and manage clinical situations they are likely to encounter on clinical clerkships, advanced sub-internships, and during the transition to residency or practice. Here are some successful integration strategies that we’ve heard from faculty users…
6 Ways to Use WISE-OnCall to Prepare Your Students for Clinical Responsibilities
March 29, 2021 | Exploring Our Content
WISE-OnCall is used by programs across medical and health professions education to help learners diagnose and manage clinical situations they are likely to encounter on clinical clerkships, advanced sub-internships, and during the transition to residency or practice. Here are some successful integration strategies that we’ve heard from faculty users…
7 Tools for Flipping Your Classroom with Aquifer
March 1, 2021 | Didactic Sessions
Whether you’re searching for ways to engage students in virtual learning, revamping a stale lecture, or building a new didactic session, flipping the classroom around Aquifer cases is a powerful way to engage your students and help case-based learning stick. Check out different ways that medical educators are integrating Aquifer cases into their pedagogy…
Case Analysis Tool: Feedback for Developing Clinical Reasoning Skills
February 17, 2021 | Assessment
In our 12-week pediatrics course for first-year PA students, we use Aquifer cases as a framework for four of our eight didactic sessions. Each Aquifer session includes an in-class lecture that covers the “don’t miss” diagnoses and difficult concepts for the topic area, followed by the students completing the related Aquifer case and the Aquifer Case Analysis Tool worksheet independently.
5 Ways to Use Aquifer Radiology
February 3, 2021 | Exploring Our Content
The 19 cases in Aquifer Radiology are designed to meet the needs of a wide range of learners and fit into many teaching modalities. Top radiology educators presented their successful strategies for integrating the cases in our recent webinar–find out what they shared…
5 Ways to Use Aquifer Geriatrics
January 4, 2021 | Exploring Our Content
The 27 cases in Aquifer Geriatrics are designed to meet the needs of a wide range of learners and fit into many teaching modalities. Top geriatrics educators from around the country presented their successful strategies for integrating the cases in our recent webinar–find out what they shared…
Teaching About Diagnostic Error: Tools for Creating Space in a Crowded Curriculum
December 14, 2020 | Curriculum Planning, Exploring Our Content
Diagnostic errors are a major source of morbidity and mortality in health care, and there is increasing focus on reducing diagnostic errors in medicine. Fitting these topics into your curriculum can be challenging. To help, I’d like to highlight strategies that educators have found successful using the cases and teaching tools included in Aquifer Diagnostic Excellence.
Lessons Learned from COVID: Trends & Teaching Strategies
November 30, 2020 | Successful Strategies
As the pandemic caused widespread disruption, Aquifer saw an unprecedented jump in the use of our cases–and many innovative ways to use the cases across curricula. Through our grant applications and many ongoing conversations with educators, we were able to identify trends and challenges and gather success stories and strategies to share.
Student Experience: Bridging the Gap Between Coursework and Patient Care
September 17, 2020 | Preparing for Clinic, Student Perspectives
This summer I began my first clinical rotation of my third year in Family Medicine. Due to local COVID-19 precautions, the first half of our rotation was being conducted virtually. During that time, we were encouraged to complete the Aquifer Family Medicine cases. In my experience, the cases were a helpful bridge to patient care from my coursework…
Easing the Transition to Clinic: An Approach to Preparing Students
September 10, 2020 | Preparing for Clinic
This year, COVID added additional challenges to the difficult transition from pre-clinical to clinical/clerkship years by limiting student and faculty interactions during the traditional orientation week. We used Aquifer to create an online Orientation Course for our LIC students that addressed multiple key concepts and facets of the transition to the clinical/clerkship years and allowed our team to focus our limited in-person time on crucial activities.
Just-in-time Teaching: Connecting Didactics with Clinical Learning for Community Faculty
August 10, 2020 | Engaging Faculty
Our community faculty are busy clinicians in local health systems or private practice. At several points throughout the clerkship, we provide calendars with the didactic and Aquifer case schedule illustrating the clinical information students will cover on campus. We actively encourage preceptors to engage in discussion with their students about what was covered during these activities outside of their offices to the benefit of both students and preceptors.
Student Perspectives: Practical Tips for Assigning Cases
June 24, 2020 | Student Perspectives, Successful Strategies
Students provide consistently high rankings for Aquifer as reported in our five-star rating feedback data, but how and when cases are integrated into the curriculum can have a significant impact on their learning. Find out what themes emerged when we ask students what methods are most effective–and discover practical tips for assigning Aquifer cases based on student feedback.
Virtual Peer Teaching with Aquifer
May 19, 2020 | Clinical Skills
When the COVID 19 pandemic interrupted our first-year medical students’ longitudinal primary care practicum (PCP), we needed to find an alternative that addressed one of its most important goals: helping students to focus the comprehensive history, exam, and documentation that they’re taught in the clinical skills course into a primary care-appropriate presentation and SOAP note. Our thoughts turned quickly to Aquifer, which is used by our internal medicine and pediatrics clerkships. Many Aquifer cases integrate well with the basic science topics our first-year courses, but most seemed a little too advanced for a mid-first year student. At the same time, senior students were eager to find ways to help, so we decided to combine Aquifer cases with ‘virtual’ peer teaching via videoconference.
Hospital Systems Learning: A Virtual Case-based Framework
May 12, 2020 | Preparing for Clinic
For those of us using virtual education time to prep students for eventual return to clinical settings, using an Aquifer case as a framework for an interactive orientation or hospital operations training session will better prepare students and interns to hit the ground running and take full advantage of rotations which, in many cases, have been shortened in duration.
Building a Core Clinical Virtual Integrated Curriculum
May 11, 2020 | Curriculum Planning
Due to curriculum modifications related to the COVID-19 pandemic, our clerkship directors were charged with developing a virtual curriculum to keep students engaged in clinical learning activities while suspended from participation in face-to-face clinical care. Rather than develop a virtual curriculum for each individual clerkship…
Strategies for Flipping the Classroom with Aquifer
May 11, 2020 | Didactic Sessions
Aquifer cases can form the basis for a huge variety of classroom sessions that can be easily adapted for virtual learning. Here are some ideas to spark your creativity if you are designing your own activity. Suggested strategies include…
The Pre-Clinical Pace: Using Cases for Early Learners
April 30, 2020 | Integrating Basic Science
If you want to use Aquifer cases as a clinical correlate in basic sciences classes just assign one case per week (e.g. pediatric case about cystic fibrosis in a genetics course; internal medicine case about anemia in hematology course). Students at UW have told me that this is about the right number of cases because the case content is complicated for early students. Students can work independently through the case and you can use it as context for discussion about how the basic science helps explain the clinical presentation–getting to the “why” behind how patients present as they do!
Reframe: Aquifer Cases as Virtual Standardized Patients
April 23, 2020 | Getting Started
Many educators are wondering how to meaningfully engage their students in distance learning activities that create community and allow them to practice important patient care skills (while not seeing patients). While I have been doing peer-to-peer consults with educators around the country about using Aquifer cases in their curriculum, I stumbled into a helpful reframe that seems to be unlocking people’s creativity: Aquifer cases (yep…more than 170 of them!) are virtual standardized patients. Wait…what?
