From 2009 to 2012, I directed the graduate course “Fundamentals of Clinical Preventive Medicine” at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. It was a required course for Hopkins preventive medicine residents, and also usually attracted other master’s level public health students and undergraduates with a strong interest in medicine. The class size was 15 to 25 students. In that setting, with a small group who generally believed that the material was important, if my teaching was inspired and the presentation compelling, I could reasonably hope for positive feedback from nearly every student.
In every academic year since (after returning to the family medicine faculty at Georgetown), my primary teaching responsibility has been co-directing a mandatory course in population health, health policy and advocacy for about 200 first-year medical students. I am proud that student ratings for the course overall and the course directors in particular have improved every year, though I suspect that at least some of this improvement is the result of more students being already aware of the health impacts of national, state, and local policy decisions, even those that ostensibly have nothing to do with medical practice.
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