Parallels of teaching music and medicine

VBS Associate Professor Erin Burton presented at the VCS Grand Rounds Seminar on Thursday, September 16, 2021. Her topic, "Clinical Coaching: Aiding the Clinical Transition from Pupil to Peer," highlights the scientific paper, "Music lessons: revealing medicine's learning cultures through comparison of music," by Christopher Watling (first author), published in Medical Education. This paper compares musicians and medical students on conceptions of learning using focus groups, and cultural perspectives diverged in terms of where learning should occur, what learning outcomes are desired, and how learning is best facilitated. Whereas medicine valued learning by doing, music valued learning by lesson. Whereas medical learners aimed for competence, music students aimed instead for ever-better performance. Whereas medical learners valued their teachers for their clinical skills more than for their teaching abilities, the opposite was true in music, in which teachers' instructional skills were paramount. Self-assessment challenged learners in both cultures, but medical learners viewed self-assessment as a skill they could develop, whereas music students recognised that external feedback would always be required.