Medical Speak
By:  Sarah Kapenga

Project at a Glance :

This project is designed for 11th/12th grade Anatomy & Physiology students to gain familiarity with about 250 medical root words (Greek/Latin) through exploring their usage in context in medical fields such as urology, cardiology, obstetrics, dermatology, etc. The project will double as career exploration and hit some ELA standards. The project will be 3 weeks. 

Driving Question:

How do we bridge the language gap between medical terminology and the language of the patient?

Standards:

• HS. SCI.HMNANT.02.2Define root words in medical terminology

Team / Culture Building:

• Teams were built based on information gathered in the early days of school related to their abilities and their preferred areas of interest. For this particular activity, and for this time in the year, I strongly encourage teacher-selected groups. ​

Entry Event:

• Nurse Jen Yoder shared her role as a school nurse. Conveniently we had a Medical Emergency Response Team (MERT) incident just an hour prior, so she could share a real world experience with the students.

Jen Yoder, School Nurse

Stakeholders:

• Doctors, nurses, interns, & other medical office staff
• Patients and patient advocates 

Empathy Building:

• Stakeholders Map
• Empathy Map ​

• Examine multiple “failure to communicate” scenarios 
• Interviews: listening to families who have gone through a medical emergency/crisis.

Inquiry / Need to Knows:

• Students read excerpts from the book How Doctors Think, by Jerome Groopman, MD
• Watch Wrong Site Surgeries clips.

• Gaining Insights - As a group we took time to share about personal experiences that related to this reading - text-to-self connections. 

Incubation:

• 100 Ideas​​

• Rule of Thirds
• How would _______ solve this?
• Group and Saturate​

• Storyboarding 

Checking in:

• Warm & Cool Feeback

• The class used fast (mini) rubrics to see if groups were running in the right direction.

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Solution Building:

• The Ideation protocol was a natural fit to run with this group because they couldn't narrow down their ideas, and their headings organically merged into one outstanding one.​​

Critique and Revision: 

• Students reevaluated their narrowed down ideas. A few teams rerouted after reviewing the Stakeholders and Empathy Maps. 

Authentic Audience:

• Nurse Jen​
• Students

Solution Examples:

• A mnemonic device and prototype to care for patients.​

• Color coding medication bottles.​

• Speak to their age - a system to communicate effectively with a wide range of age groups.
• A robot translator to aide medical professionals.

Click here for teacher's full plan.
Reflection and Feedback:

• The winning team won a 2-foot tall ANATOMY trophy and bragging rights!

Click here for the teacher's Journey through PBL on Padlet . . .

Meet the Educator:

​Sarah Kapenga teaches physical science and human anatomy at Hamilton High School.

          "PBL projects give context and purpose to important concepts in our disciplines. When students recognize the teacher and audience as having credibility, they'll stop at nothing to excel."