Promoting Active Learning in Residency Didactic Sessions

In the early 1990s, a revolution began in the American higher educational system. The time had come to change the focus of education from teaching to learning. Instead of focusing on what was covered in a didactic session, such as grand rounds, a call emerged to shift the focus instead to the extent that learners actually learned. In theory, this shift would have been readily accepted by educators as a logical direction to pursue. In practice, however, moving educational practices in this direction has been an exceedingly difficult challenge. Changing practice is never easy. To move from teaching to learning, educators must think about teaching in a different way. This shift means moving from traditional lectures of content-laden material to instructional methods designed to draw learners directly into their own learning, and difficulty has been increased by the ubiquity of PowerPoint software. Succinctly stated by King in 1993, it involves moving “from sage on the stage to guide on the side.”