#51 From Bored to Board Ready: Reimagining Conference Didactics to Engage Learners from AIMW25 with Dr Rebecca Garber and Dr Beth Ward with Dr Rebecca Garber and Dr Beth Ward

May 28, 2025 | By Molly Heublein

Audio

Transcript available via YouTube

Ready to revive your learner conferences?  This powerhouse episode of Curbsiders Teach brings together Dr. Rebecca Garber and Dr. Beth Ward at AIMW25 to share high-yield, practical strategies for transforming didactic sessions into dynamic, must-attend learning experiences. Tune in for inspiring ideas like Pecha Kucha, gamification, and interdisciplinary learning that will energize your teaching toolkit and re-engage your learners!

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Meet our Guests:

Dr. Rebecca Garber was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia, attended medical school at The Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University in Philadelphia and internal medicine residency at the University of Illinois in Chicago, where she is currently serving as the Medical Education and Research Chief Resident.  Dr Garber is passionate about medical education and created the website “When The Beat Drops” as a resident’s guide to the CCU (www.whenthebeatdrops.org). In July, she will begin her cardiology fellowship at The Ohio State University.

Dr. Elizabeth (Beth) Ward grew up in Chicago and attended medical school at the University of Illinois at Chicago, then residency and chief residency at the University of Chicago NorthShore program, which is now Endeavor Health. Since residency, she has stayed on as a primary care physician caring for a primarily underserved community and serves as IM Residency Associate Program Director. 

Show Segments

• Intro, disclaimer, guest bio
• Guest one-liner/ Reflections on AIMW25 conference
• Why it is so hard to get learners to come to conference
• Why does it matter?
• Structural changes to improve conference attendance
• Techniques to improve conference delivery
• Take home points
• Outro

Enhancing Educational Sessions Pearls

1. Diagnose the Problem Before Treating It: Low engagement in didactics often stems from structural (learners are busy with other tasks/patient care), cultural (learning is deprioritized), and learner-related issues (conferences are not seen as engaging or valuable). A SWOT analysis helps identify key internal and external factors to target for improvement.
2. Engagement is Key – Ditch the Monologue, Embrace the Dialogue: Passive lectures don’t resonate with today’s learners. Techniques like Pecha Kucha, audience participation, and co-creation make sessions more interactive.  

Innovative Approaches and Structural Change – You’re Not Alone: Revitalizing didactics requires both creative instructional strategies (e.g., podcasts, expert-led and multidisciplinary case discussions, gamification) and structural changes like protecting learning time and setting expectations.

Enhancing Educational Sessions Notes 

This episode draws on workshops given at AIMW25: Getting ROSC: The Return of the Successful Conference presented by Anuj Chokshi MD, Rebecca Garber MD, Austin Kaboff DO, and Michael Siegel DO and Conferences beyond the Standard Lecture: Creating Engaging Educational Experiences presented by Catherine Glunz MD, Liza Icayan MD, and Elizabeth Ward MD.

Why is it so Difficult to get Learners to go to Conferences?

Residents are very busy – they work in multiple roles focusing on patient care, education, and clinical tasks – making it challenging to attend learning sessions.

The COVID-19 pandemic moved many conferences to remote, and the culture has not fully shifted back to in person learning.  

Learners today are more comfortable and confident using asynchronous learning, such as podcasts or online resources, as they can tailor the learning to their specific learning style and use these resources at times when they actually have the time to learn.

Sometimes lectures are dull, haven’t been updated in years, or are not taught to the correct level of the audience, reinforcing the feeling that it’s not worth the time to attend a conference.

In-Person Education Matters for Health Professions Learners

In person conferences are more likely to contribute to active learning which improves retention (Deslauriers 2019).  Check out our prior episode on the Science of Learning for more details on key techniques for learning.

Residents are here to learn, and educators need to prioritize this goal.  We need to standardize formal learning opportunities to make sure residents are learning the full complement of material.  In the past few years,  the Internal Medicine board pass rates for first-time test takers have fallen, aligning with the COVID-19 pandemic. There is thought that improving conference attendance and engagement may help address this pass rate issue (ABIM website).

Learning with others can be revitalizing as it can help build community and show learners that they are more than a “cog in a wheel” (Jung 2012, Albert 2022).  Learning together also helps normalize the struggle with a challenging topic.

How to Improve Conference Engagement

Engagement is “a condition of emotional, social and intellectual readiness to learn characterized by curiosity, participation and drive to learn more” (Abla 2019).

If you feed them they will come!  Provide lunch (Cosimini 2016) is a first (yummy!) step to help engage learners and their likelihood to attend conferences.

Hold learners accountable – set expectations and track attendance.  Dr Garber’s program requires a 60% conference attendance. All residents are assessed bi-annually to ensure attendance is at goal. Residents with low scores (especially those with low In-Training Exams) meet with faculty members to assess barriers to conference attendance. Moreover, their program has tied attendance to other opportunities: only residents with >60% attendance are allowed to moonlight.

Make sure to protect learning time and establish a culture that allows residents to freely go to conferences. Institutional buy-in is necessary to create this. For example, at Dr. Garber’s institution, the emergency department does not admit patients to internal medicine during the noon conference hour, nurses know that non-urgent pages should wait until after 1pm, and any pages that do occur during this time are answered and triaged by chief residents or on-service attendings.   Finally, ensuring that conferences are respectful of the residents’ time by starting and ending on time also helps to build a culture of valuing didactics and increased conference attendance.

Create psychological safety in the sessions where learners feel comfortable attending, sharing, making mistakes, and learning together.

Make sure the content is relevant.  Cut content that doesn’t add to the educational mission. Be clear about what the goals and objectives of the conference are – consider if other educational experiences would be better than a lecture.  Use backward design to create the content based on the end goal and objectives.  

Ask learners for feedback on speakers and content.  Be nimble and change things up in terms of instructional strategies used.  Continue lectures and topics that are engaging and popular.  Switch up topics or presentations that are less engaging.  Coach faculty or pair them with successful content deliverers to improve their presentations and also appreciate that they are often volunteering to give these talks and may have limited time/energy to adjust.  

Quality over quantity.  Conferences can be shorter than an hour.  Make sure they end on time.

Different approaches to delivering the Content

Create experiences the educators want to be at!  If we are bored, the learners are too.  Try out different styles beyond the standard lecture to improve engagement (Wray 2019).

Dr Garber highlights a particular faculty member who delivers a very popular session called “A Picture is Worth 1000 Words”- showing a series of chest x-rays over a hospitalization to describe pathology, teach skills in reading radiology images, and follow a case in a unique way that is very popular with learners.

Incorporate podcasts into teaching – if there isn’t formal teaching that day, assign a podcast, and tell the learner to go for a walk during lunch and listen (Chaiklin 2024).  Dr Garber has her residents email the chief with a quick summary of what they learned to get credit for attendance.

Ask the Expert – bring in a master clinician to teach clinical reasoning as they work through a case out loud in the moment.  Learners can look up medical knowledge or facts, but what they want to learn are skills or techniques that are not easy to read about such as diagnostic reasoning.

Make content interactive. Make things entertaining.

Talk about a unique topic – choosing something that the learners have not seen before brings a higher level of engagement than for topics people are familiar with.  Dr Ward shares the example of a session on medical insurance 101.

Have multiple presenters.  

Get learners to buy in.  Tie the topics back to direct, recent patient care.  Have learners deliver the content in order to have ownership of the approach.  

Gamification – medical escape room.

Emotionally powerful storytelling is another way to solidify learning.

Use hands-on skills training.

Pecha Kucha style or “chit-chat” conferences. This is a strategy for teaching where presenters get 20 slides x 20 seconds each, leading to a 6-minute, 40-second presentation (Abraham 2018).

Make conferences interdisciplinary –Multidisciplinary case conferences allow for interesting discussion, as well as exposure to different opinions and expert discussants.  For example, present a joint case with another service such as surgery to expand perspectives and build interdisciplinary relationships.  (Cooper 2017, Velez 2023)

SWOT analysis

SWOT stands for Strengths & Weaknesses (intrinsic) and Opportunities & Threats (extrinsic) factors, which is adapted from the business world to assess internal and external factors that hinder or support success (Teoli 2023).  Learn from others and use reflection and introspection to assess where your program is at.  Adjust what you are doing to give learners the best educational experiences possible.  Utilize SWOT analysis for your own educational situation. 

Take home points:

Remember to focus on your end goal of the education, choose a delivery technique and focus on content that engages learners and advances learning.

While residents are learners first, they usually put patient care before their own learning.  As such, educators need to prioritize the residents’ education.  Create an environment that supports learners to focus on learning and to provide protected time.

Be introspective around what works and what doesn’t–make changes based on these reflections and learn from others’ successes.

Don’t give up!  Getting learners back to conferences can feel daunting, but it is worth it.  Keep things active, relevant, and fun.

Links

1. When the Beat Drops, A Resident’s Guide to the CCU a free, open access resource created by Dr Garber

Goal

Listeners will have actionable next steps to revamp their teaching or training program in order to improve learning conferences.

Learning objectives

After listening to this episode, listeners will…

1. Name common barriers to successful in person conferences for trainees.
2. Describe specific techniques a presenter can use to increase learner engagement in conferences.
3. Employ the SWOT approach to improve in person learning conferences by assessing both internal and external factors that hinder the educational experience. 

Disclosures

Drs Garber and Ward report no relevant financial disclosures. The Curbsiders TEACH reports no relevant financial disclosures. 

Citation

Heublein M, Garber R, Ward E, Chaiklin C, Kryzhanovskaya E. “#51 From Bored to Board Ready: Reimagining Conference Didactics to Engage Learners from AIMW25”. The Curbsiders Teach Podcast. https://thecurbsiders.com/teach.  May 28, 2025.