Penn Reading Project

The University of Pennsylvania usually sets a book for their new students to read over the summer before term begins. It’s a way of introducing their freshmen to academic life. This year, however, they’ve set a painting to be studied instead of a book.
They’ve chosen the local artist, Thomas Eakins and his 1875 painting “The [...]

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Two mindsets – fixed and growth

Stanford university psychologist, Carol Dweck has published a book entitled “Mindset. The New Psychology of Success” (ISBN 978-0-345-47232-8). Guy Kawasaki posted about it, and wrote a commendation which is printed on the front page. And Stanford Magazine did an article about it last year.
She’s identified two “mindsets” in relation to how people approach challenges and [...]

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The importance of the person in medicine

Sometimes these days, with the dominant biomedical model of health and illness it can seem like people don’t actually matter. The individual stories of patients are dismissed as anecdotes and treatments are divided into one of two categories “proven” or “unproven” on the basis of statistical analyses of clinical trials (experiments on pre-selected groups of [...]

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How we learn – teaching and training

Pick the Brain has a great post about teaching and learning. It’s called The Movie Director’s Guide to Effective Teaching. In it, Victor Stachura, the author refers to William Glasser’s theories. Well, this is new to me. I’ve never heard of William Glasser. If you have, what do you think about his ideas and his [...]

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If it’s not fun, it’s hard to learn

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is an intersting author. He’s promoted the concept of ‘flow’ experiences from his research into happiness. This article by him is about education.

It has turned out that mass education is more difficult to achieve than [...]

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Improving health by aiming at something else….

 Now, here’s an interesting study. It’ll soon be published in the November issue of the American Journal of Public Health. There’s a way of considering the amount of health benefit from an intervention. It’s to assess the number quality-adjusted life-year gains per dollar invested. That is, not just benefits in terms of greater life expectancy, [...]

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How we cope – learning from the movies. Part 4

We all cope in different ways. In this series we’re looking at ways of coping in parts 3, 4 and 5. In part 3 we looked at the activist way of coping.
Now let’s consider control as a strategy. The world can be a very scary place. For many people the events that occur in their [...]

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How we cope – learning from the movies. Part 3

One aspect of understanding someone is listen to their story and hear what they talk about – material, physical, practical issues? emotional and relationship issues? or spiritual issues of meaning and purpose? Another aspect is to find out what kind of ideas they have about themselves in relation to others – in particular to explore [...]

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How we cope – learning from the movies. Part 2

This is Part 2 in a series. You’ll find Part 1 here.
One of the major ways of creating a sense of self is through group identity. We see this especially strongly in small towns and villages where there are very real, very active communities. What I mean by that is not just people who live [...]

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How we cope – learning from the movies. Part 1

I was recently asked to give a talk at a Palliative Care Conference in Dundee. One of the organisers had seen me use movies as a educational tool when teaching doctors and wanted me to demonstrate that. It was well received and I thought I’d put up a series of posts based on the [...]

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