UMEC Spotlight on Faculty Development: Dayna Burrell, MD
Meet Dayna Burrell, MD, of The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, Women & Infants Hospital
Presenter at the 2017 Martin L. Stone, MD, Faculty Development Seminar
“Escaping the PowerPoint Quicksand: Engaging Your Faculty in Interactive Teaching Modalities”
Anyone who has tried to teach knows that it’s not easy to keep learners engaged and involved in your presentation. Doctor Dayna Burrell and her colleagues, inspired by previous sessions at APGO’s Faculty Development Seminars, realized this and thought they might have some ideas to help other educators push past this challenge. “In the current climate of medical education, standard 
lectures aren’t often enough to keep the audience captive and engaged,” Burrell said. “Didactics involving flipping the classroom, small group learning and simulations have been successful in overcoming some of these challenges.”
At the 2017 Martin L. Stone, MD, Faculty Development Seminar, Doctor Burrell (along with Silka Patel, MD, and Betty Chou, MD) presented on “Escaping the PowerPoint Quicksand: Engaging Your Faculty in Interactive Teaching Modalities” on Sunday, January 8, 2017, the Hyatt Regency Indian Wells near Palm Springs, California.
APGO: What are the resources that you found most useful (including APGO resources)?
Doctor Burrell: Our presentation referenced a YouTube channel called “Ob/Gyn in Popular Culture,” created by colleagues from the Mayo Clinic. I learned about this channel from attending the APGO FDS last year and subsequently incorporated some of their ideas into our didactics. PubMed articles specifically referenced the challenges of engaging learners from different generations, particularly when the educators tend to be from quite different generations as our learners. We used PollEverywhere within our talk to both engage the audience, as well as to show our audience how it can be easily incorporated into a presentation.
APGO: What challenges did you encounter when developing your program? What was the solution?
Doctor Burrell: We had some challenges developing a balance between our presentation formats and demonstrating how to use each in a time-efficient manner. We resolved this by giving a brief introduction to each format/presentation technique and then breaking into small groups, where we could help demonstrate individual techniques in greater detail.
APGO: What was the inspiration for coming up with this topic?
Doctor Burrell: Our inspiration for this topic stemmed from the helpful information that we have received from APGO FDS presentations in the past. Oftentimes, new technology, presentation formats and innovations can seem daunting or intimidating for our educators to take on. We wanted to show a breadth of options from completely new presentation formats to variations that can be added in to PowerPoint to make presentations more engaging for our learners, who are often more technologically advanced than we are! We thought it would be helpful to those attending FDS to provide helpful suggestions for revamping presentations so that they could return to their home institutions with new ideas to educate their educators.
APGO: What are one to three things that you hope people who attend your presentation at the Faculty Development Seminar take home with them?
Doctor Burrell: I hope that people who attend our presentation are more willing to try different presentation techniques, and will go back to their home institutions to share these new ideas with their own faculty.
For more informative sessions such as Doctor Burrell’s, mark your calendar for the 2018 APGO’s Martin L. Stone, MD, Faculty Development Seminar to be held at the Eau Palm Beach Resort & Spa in Manalapan, Florida from January 6-9, 2018.