Abstract
As part of their medical education, a student medic needs to develop the thinking and values essential to practice. This is so they can be the best doctor that they are able: to serve their clients, their profession and the societies in which they work. However, helping a student develop their thinking and values in the classroom can be difficult. This difficulty can be as a result of many factors, some related to a teacher’s practice. For example, a medical teacher might try to develop a student’s thinking under the remit of developing critical thinking, but the convoluted debate and complex literature about critical thinking can mean a student is confused about what the teacher means. A teacher might also use a proven teaching method such as discussion, but one that might cause a student to experience fear or anxiety such that the student disengages from learning. A teacher who uses a similar teaching method and aims to develop a student’s values can also experience difficulties. In this case, the difficulty might be because values can be a sensitive, highly personal topic and challenging for a student to discuss. A teacher who aims to cultivate student thinking or values might also experience a lack of specific pedagogical guidance about how to teach for this in the classroom. The pursuit of a solution for these problems was the main objective of the current thesis. I use a framework drawn from Barnett’s (1997) ideas about critical thinking, critical action and critical being, which I developed into the theory of Critical Being (Blakey, 2011; 2014). In the current thesis I extend this pursuit to develop and test ideas about how a medical teacher might educate for Critical Being. I used a year-long action research project in the context of small group teaching on an MBChB (degrees in medicine) programme with self-selected teacher participants who wished to improve their practice. Results showed that better cultivating student thinking and values as part of this theory might depend on what a teacher does, how they do it, and who they are: for some students, a teacher needed to use specific language about the thinking they wish to cultivate; for others, a teacher also needed to act well to manage the students’ emotion about learning, or manage their own emotion if the student was ‘difficult’. I also found that cultivating a student’s thinking might also depend, for some, on a teacher’s own values such as caring and their valuing of the teaching method they use, process (e.g. reflective thinking) or topic which they teach. Results have potential implications for medical teacher practice, how an institution might support a medical teacher in practice and how they might be selected for employment. To better educate a medical student might depend on more than administration of teaching method alone.