Jeremey Walker, MD, Assistant Professor, Heersink School of Medicine
Jeremey Walker, MD thoroughly enjoys working with medical students and serves in a co-director role for both a Microbiology course for MS-1 students and the Medicine Clerkship for MS-3 students. He is a Learning Community Mentor which spans across all four years and includes a curriculum focused on wellness, professional development, ethics and inter-professional teamwork. He enjoys curriculum development and particularly incorporating gamification into curricular design.
I found many of the mentors I was drawn to in medical school and residency were great educators. I admired the energy they brought to teaching and the way they organized and delivered content that was easy to engage with and learn from. This is what I tried to emulate when I began to have opportunities. My residency included a clinician-educator track, which gave me some background in adult learning theory and the tools to review and improve my content. As a CMR and into fellowship I found the moments I was engaged in teaching to be some of my most enjoyable and a source of energy.
The beautiful thing about Infectious Diseases is that there are opportunities to teach on so many levels. I love the traditional settings of morning reports, noon conferences, and bedside rounding and take those opportunities when they come within the residency or fellowship. But since my clinical focus is immune-compromised ID I've found that many of these lectures or chalk-talks can be easily modified for another audience such as the heme providers, liver transplant team, or pulmonary fellows. A couple of years ago, I received a small institutional grant to help support the development of gamified question banks (similar to the ID Fellows Cup) in other areas. This helped me to recognize the exponential effect of helping others to develop education skills. It has allowed me to support a question bank in things close to my heart such as infection prevention and antimicrobial stewardship, but also family medicine, sports medicine, radiology, pulmonary, endocrine, and immunology. More recently we developed a class for medical students designed to introduce them to educational theory and question writing. The point comes back to advice from one of my mentors James Willig who encouraged me to always think about ways to get multiple uses out of the content I'm creating. Sometimes it's making a dynamic chalk-talk framework that will remain relevant year to year or across learner levels. Other times it's working out a process, like how to write and design a question bank and sharing that with others looking to collaborate.
I began working with our Microbiology course as a fellow when one of my mentors Rachael Lee asked if I would be interested in developing a formative question bank to augment their didactics. It allowed me to become familiar with the curriculum and provided for an easy transition into the role of co-director as I entered into faculty. Similarly, I participated in learning communities as a resident and fellow which allowed me to develop skills and appreciation for the curriculum that eventually led to an opportunity to join as a faculty mentor. In short, I've learned a lot through doing, but a critical piece is I've never had to do it alone. I'm so thankful for the mentors and colleagues who have been there with me and provided professional development and feedback to make me better. Many of these teaching opportunities have come with the protection of time and resources I needed to be successful. This has then led to sponsorship and other opportunities. I feel very fortunate because the moments I'm in a teaching role are some of my favorite, and I find I do that almost every day.
The work we've done with the ID Fellows Cup has been some of the most surprising and rewarding. The question bank created for the MS1 Microbiology module led to an ID Week abstract in 2020. Nathan Nolan watched it and asked if we had considered doing this for fellows. With the support and some social media sponsorship from ID Fellows Network and Febrile podcast, the first round of ID Fellows Cup began in 2020. The initial questions were written by a small group of fellows (myself included) and institutional mentors (including several previously highlighted in this feature: Todd McCarty, Prathit Kulkarni, Gerome Escota). Over the next three years, we hosted 6 competitions and developed a process that allowed our 300 ID board-style questions to be generated by a much larger group of fellows and faculty from around the world. This has allowed us to engage 1,693 unique learners and over 100 different institutions. We like to think of each question answered as a teaching moment and since we began we've fostered 160,482 teaching moments. My favorite part is the collective effort required. We provide a framework and learning objective to trainees and mentors who then construct the question. We perform final edits and entry and everyone benefits from the diversity this approach allows. It also begins to feel like a community, particularly when we get to see each other at conferences such as ID Week. The number of people who have contributed through writing, editing, sponsorship is way too long for me to individually note, but check out our handle on X (@IDFellowsCup) and you will see posts highlighting them. I do want to highlight Nico Herrera and Mauricio Kahn who are my co-conspirators/game managers that keep this innovation going!
I struggle as do many others with several papers (including describing the fellow's cup) hanging in that upper right quadrant alongside other things that are important but not urgent. Through setting deadlines and a slow march forward I have been able to describe our work using gamification in question banks at the UME level PMID: 35531347 ; 38188412 ; 34849256.
Recently I had the opportunity to participate in a 2-day POCUS seminar and have tried to implement that in my practice. Beyond the benefit to patients (if I ever develop the skill), I've appreciated that many of the residents are already quite skilled in it. This offers a clear chance for them to teach me and other learners on the team. When those barriers break down and you develop a community of learning, that is something I appreciate. This leads directly into the other thing that comes to mind which is the mentors and colleagues I've come to know and admire. A great example of a learning community is the ID Digital Institute an initiative that Sara Dong has led and I've had the privilege to be a part of the leadership team. Being able to meet and collaborate with the many talented and innovative educators in ID is something I've cherished and I look forward to many more opportunities in the future!