The Queen's Teaching Style

[f.b.kal]

An important criterion for choosing a medical school is the match between the programs teaching style and ones personal learning style. As such, I would appreciate any information about the teaching methodologies/focuses at Queen’s. For example, how much focus is placed on PBL, self-directed learning, group work and assingments/projects? Through their teaching, do they emphasize or promote research, family medicine, or any particular specialty to any significant extent? Is learning dynamic; that is, how are didactic lectures counterbalanced by other teaching methods like symposiums or tutorials?

 

Thanks a lot for the help.

[coastalslacker]

I thought PBL would be great before medical school and it was an aspect of Queens' program that I was quite enthusiastic about. Turns out, PBL was a huge waste of time, so much so that I exercised a loophole found by a friend and simply did not attend one entire semester of it.

 

I guess the moral of this is not to put too much stock in a particular school's "teaching style" (or in one individual's opinion of it). Med school is what you make of it, you'll get the info you need wherever you go to school.

 

Personally, I found the quality of lectures at Queens' highly variable. For every great lecture that enhanced your understanding of a topic there was another that either wasted your time or bludgeoned you with pointless minutae. However, given that Queen's does not require attendance (as I have heard some schools do, not sure which), one can easily avoid this and learn the material on one's own. Queens' makes an effort to promote Family Medicine but by and large does a poor job of it, giving family medicine docs fluff lecture topics.

 

In retrospect, this all sounds pretty negative, but I kind of doubt that it is overly different anywhere else.

 

cheers,

[sensfan]

queen's has worked in recent years to amed the PBL program, and my opinion is that they're doing a pretty good job. i went in fearing PBL. all i ever heard about PBL was "waste of time", "boring", "brutal", etc. however, i actually didn't mind it. in fact, at times, i kinda liked it. i think a lot of it depends on the group of people you are in (and the tutor). some groups are really hardcore. others are not. others are in between. my group had fun with PBL, we always had good food and finished up at least an hour early. it's only once a week, it's pretty much impossible to fail, and the cases were mostly pretty decent. in the end, PBL was not this horrendous experience i was preparing for... as for queen's teaching style in general, it varies a LOT between blocks. our musculoskeletal block was all self study followed by team based learning (working through cases in teams during lecture time), while immunology and microbiology were pure lectures. infectious diseases was lectures as well as ten 2 hour case study sessions to solidify those concepts. as far as marks go, there's the odd few assignments in things like ethics and law that are either pass/fail or worth nothing. most of our marks are from final exams at the end of each semester. i hope that kind of gives the right idea... personally, i like the teaching style here... Phase I was pretty dumb, but after that, i think it really picks up. as far as i'm concerned, for quality of education, you can't really get much better than we've got it here. the faculty are amazing and dedicated, and the school works really hard to make things better every year.

[pinkdoc]

Queen's is also really overhauling the undergraduate family medicine curriculum so the previous years' perspective may not be the most accurate. We are currently trying to include family medicine clinical experience and the most common presenting complaints in family medicine in the curriculum in first year. There is also a new undergraduate family medicine director coming in this year and he's really enthusiastic so I think things will improve drastically.