Med. Students with 1st Graders! Thanks for bringing a real brain!

Ms Dawn & Mr. Rubio,

It was a pleasure meeting you and your delightful students today.  Thank you for inviting a group of talented medical students to engage with the children.  This was a great opportunity for advancing their professional skill development and hopefully in return they added value to your important work as educators.

To be effective as either an educator of children or a physician of children requires an understanding of age related development.  Today’s activities offered the medical students a chance to see Piaget’s Stages of Development in action, that is, transitioning from Stage 2, Preoperational (ages 2-6 yr) to Stage 3, Concrete operational (ages 6-11 yr).  they also saw examples of how teachers promote the children’s developmental transition from magical thinking and explanation of scientific phenomenon to reasoned deductions based on facts.  Example:  Did anyone overhear Ms Dawn point out to one child that a part of their response to a question about the brain was “pretend”?  Then she skillfully re-directed him back to the point of divergence from fact to “fiction” and had him start his explanation again.  This time he was able to finish his reasoned though completely based on the facts.

The exercise today gave the students a chance to practice deductive reasoning (head injury v. head injury protection using helmets), objective causality (hand hygiene gets rid of germs that cause illness), de-centering or seeing another’s perspective (giving shots to aid in health rather than to be mean), and mental reverses in thinking to help gain understanding (protecting the egg by using softer scrunched up paper v. the harder mass when scrunched up smaller).  The latter was also an exercise in understanding mass, volume and linear time.  The children demonstrated the variation in conceptual thinking and processing time as well.  We use all of these concepts daily as pediatricians in structuring our interactions with children and assessing their responses to our medical interviewing questions and during the clinical reasoning process.

Thanks again for opening up your classrooms and sharing your amazing and beautiful children.

Carol A. Miller, MD