A New Blog is Born
Over the last several weeks, I’ve been hard at work with the start of the new school year and semester at UNC. For the first time, I am teaching Healthcare Policy for the Bachelors of Science in Public Health program, in addition to the Quality Improvement class for the Executive Masters students (Masters in Healthcare Administration, plus the occasional Masters of Public Health student). After a summer focused on consulting projects, it is great to again have a chalk board at my back and brilliant students to my front.
With every class, I try to insert something different and fun (beyond the normal text readings and tests). With the marketing class, it is stockholder presentations accompanying the computer simulation of a competitive market economy, where student teams manage the marketing functions of notional companies — to including creating the advertising. With the CQI class, it is a quality improvement project at their work, which often equates to some free consulting in a real world setting.
For the Health Policy class there are two creative efforts that I hope will make the class all-the-more meaningful for my 35 undergrads (seniors). The first is a set of weekly debates, where students are divided into eight teams and randomly assigned to take pro or con positions on contentious topics of healthcare policy. Last Thursday was devoted to the healthcare policy proposals by the two major-party presidential candidates. I’m pleased to report that things became nicely heated.
In fact, an interesting thing happened during the debate. The teams are the same as for another class, taught by my colleague Chris Shea, and he assigned the teams. Having them on the same teams for both classes provides a time management benefit, allowing the students to meet just once per week to coordinate their efforts for both classes. With each health policy topic for debate, the teams are assigned to take pro or con positions without regard to the student’s personal views — expecting that they will serve as advocates for their designated positions, just as a public defender may be assigned to represent an evidently guilty client. Well, during the debate, several students became animated defenders of their assigned position, even though, by self-report, they favor the other side. It is amazing what a little competition will do get students involved in their work, and the rest of the class benefited from the vigorous and balanced presentation of the two proposals.
The second focus of the class is the creation of an E-Zine, “Informed Dissent,” where students write articles on various topics of healthcare policy, published twice per month (every two weeks). The first slate of articles was just published, and I’m pleased with the initial results. By the end of the semester, I hope to see students employing lateral thinking in their pieces, and some showed significant signs of heading in that direction with their first offerings. At the moment, I am going through and providing follow-on questions/comments beneath each article, in an effort to take their thinking to the next level — with the recognition that, no matter how strong a given position seems when writing about it, the complexity of policy, economics, politics, and human nature make this suspect at best. If this stuff were easy, I’d be in a different line of work.
For those who are interested in health policy, allow me to invite you to visit “Informed Dissent” and offer comments to any of the articles. The URL is:
http://informeddessent.wordpress.com/
While I want the students to learn lateral thinking and written advocacy, the reason for making this public is to have students confront opposing positions and public opinion. So, don’t be shy. Drop in and give them some well-reasoned push-back.
