Teaching Clinical Anatomy without Lectures in an Integrated Medical School Curriculum

With the wholesale push to move medical curricula toward integration and organ system‐based courses, many basic medical science disciplines have had to compensate for loss of didactic time. Anatomy has perhaps seen the most reduction overall due to the extensive hours used in traditional curricula dedicated to lecture and dissection labs. The lab portion of the anatomy curriculum has borne most of the reduction. Various solutions have been implemented to deal with this reduction ( e.g. , prosection). Here, we describe an approach whereby the majority of anatomy content is taught and assessed in lab rather than in lectures. We use a modified jigsaw approach within the lab to maximize the amount of content delivered in the curricular time allotted for anatomy. Each lab is split into small groups with different sets of learning objectives that fall under the larger session objectives. Instructors facilitate each group's topic during one hour of the lab session (learning hour). Each group must assemble a presentation prior to the next lab session. The presentation is no more than 10 minutes long while delivering the bulk of the learning objectives. During the first hour of the next lab session (teaching hour), each group member is responsible for teaching a subset of their peers for 10 minutes. After that, group members and peer learners rotate stations, so each member of a group spends 10 minutes teaching their peers, and then rotates to different stations learning from their peers over the remaining course of the teaching hour. The learning objectives are crafted to facilitate teaching via clinical applications. For example, a group responsible for the supraclavicular brachial plexus may teach some of the anatomical structures by describing the deficits noted in Erb's palsy. Following the teaching hour, we provide a brief review session with clicker‐style questions. At the end of the week, the course has formative quizzes that include one anatomy‐based clinical vignette question per group. We assess students via a traditional lab practical with 30 pinned and 15 follow‐up questions—follow‐ups are typically more clinically oriented than the pinned questions. The method outlined here has shown impressive results relative to the other techniques used in the curriculum ( e.g. , case‐, team‐based learning). Indeed, among practice tests ( i.e. , National Board of Medical Examiners' Comprehensive Basic Science Examination) and on the United States Medical Licensing Examination Step 1 examination, our students have performed better in anatomy than in any other basic science discipline. Despite the inevitable reduction in time for medical anatomy within integrated curricula, these results suggest that this method is a viable alternative focused on the lab‐based science of clinical anatomy. This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal .