Front matter

Editors: Bud Nicola Amy Hagopian

Bentham @ Books

Edited By:

FOREWORD oooi atu AERAR RE usa E ER A REE EN E nat teen neni’ i LN TA E iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ee RAN E RIE ENE E EN AE EENE vi EIST:OF CONTRIBUTORS Zeite a aE E EEE aE E A aun E vii LU ULC HN LA RE ix CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND (oon. cce cece teeseseeesesessetseseeececsesseesscseeetasaeseees 3 Aaron Katz, Jack Thompson and Frederick A. Connell PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING: ene cit tontinv ee EEEO RER AETERNE 4 CHALLENGES corsgisantenoontrni io o shes sa EE ieasa loca RA AR n A aleve a A ce edie eager dead 5 COMMUNITY. AND SOCIAL JUSTICE: eegenen ties seas a n tine Eege esas E 7 CONFLICT OR INTERES ©. geeiert ee ege See ee Seene 8 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 23: an E R RER Dees 9 REFERENCES ENEE E TRR TO area OER O E R 9 COSURI COMPETENCIES ooo ccsecsescscscorenesseevesessonsscseeseassesssscscssonssessssonssessensasseessavsesseseessseneseeses 10 Amy Hagopian INTRODUCTION entree e E E EE NEES 10 WHAT THE WORKPLACE DEMANDS oon ceescseceenessencseneesenssesseceacnecsesesssconssessensessessassesseesesnessenes 11 COPHP‘ E RG LIN RN LEE 14 MASTERING REAL WORK ue eet) 15 You:Never-Die'of Just One Thing deed ENEE ENEE 17 Mystery-at Saddle‘ Mountain. et ege edel 18 When Groundhog Day Meets Kafka wo... cececssesesesceeeesscseeecsescseescseseeecscseeesscseeesesseseecassesseesaeeeeenseneed 19 Research Project: iesen Ee AER 19 LOOKING TOWARD THE FUTURE NEEN 20 NOTES E 20 CONFLICT OF INTEREST . 20 ACKNOWLEDGMENT S stade 20 REFERENCES o a a a A A A N NRS 20 E PEDAGOGY oii n a a a A a a a evens ERAR 22 A. Gita Krishnaswamy and Bud Nicola MIN TFRODUCTION a A toe 23 PBL METHODS-AND: PRINCIPLES eneen 23 TRANSLATING: PB ELEMENTS ee 25 Case: Development? eene Ee EENS 25 Shall: Group Composition Aere en EAEE A RE AE EEO REESE RRT A RR REGE RRE 26 Group: Work and Individual; WOrK konn a a A R REO ROR A R A aa 26 Research MethodSri innesa annaa a A A sveravi SEENEN EES 26 Reiterative Learning Cy Cle? zs seccesc.tetyssaceessbits nesses EN R E E Meas’ 27 Technölógy Aua ee EE EE EE eres 27 Academie EE 28 Evaluation of the Pedagogy .. . 28

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS EE 29

REFERENCES eer eege 29 CHAPTER 4 ADMINISTRATIVE CONSIDERATIONS (oo. ceeeeeceesesseesseseeeeecseseeessesesessesseesensenees 31 Peter House INTRODUCTION rra n rai rE AE AEAEE RER EES 31 ADMISSIONS .. . 32 MARIE ON LEE ER STUDENT SUPPORT NEE 34 FACULTY SUPPORT AND RECRUITING seiss EENEG 35 INSTRUCTIONAL TECHNOLOGY: cini ro E EREE EEEE E EOE ETOK 36 EDUCATIONAL EVALUATION. siera r EA AARAA AR EEEE R ERTA 37 INSTITUTIONAL: RELATIONSHIPS eege E E O EE cess atau E EO 38 ANTI-RACISM AND SOCIAL JUSTICE STRATEGIES oo... ceccceeceeesessseseeeeseseenseseesenseneeeees 39 ACUMNI RELATIONS oihalen Ree e ean i an ara SS Cen ear Ge te aati 39 CONFLICT OF INTEREST iel na E case E E E E EE 40 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS aoaeiaa e rE KEE EAE E REE NEEE EES EES 40 Ti" BUILDING A CULTURE ..sesereessrserserertsrsstsserertsrsresserertsrtsessseeresreriseseorestestvistorostereristsrostssere 41 A. Gita Krishnaswamy and Amy Hagopian CONTENT IN CONTEXT CREATING A COMMUNITY OF LEARNERS A 44 The Admissions Process: esoe Ree eege 44 ATT VIN at THEW oh se eee ah ed ae Ua a a a SEENEN Ate 45 Case‘0: Heading Upstream: Together AER 46 Classroom KU 47 Student: Leadership:and Service: ee EAR 48 BEYOND THE PROGRAM: stees gees geed eege 49 CONFLICT OR INTERES Ds. ssos0csscccctebsscessssacscstdsseanaedea Anaa ROER RR a ENEE 50 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS? i inian r AERA Siete Seaside asl a oe neal sie Aaa aac 50 rn "RRE HANDBOOKS oon eeeseccscsecnesessvecersessensscsesseessesssaacssonssessuconssessonsassessassesssssesseeneaeeses 51 Brett Niessen and Kelly Gilmore BACKGROUND . 51

Foreword

How can we best prepare the public health workforce for today’s world?

Diseases and disabilities in the human population today are extraordinarily complex: from chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer; to infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS, H1N1 influenza, and Ebola; to illnesses related to occupational and environmental conditions such as asbestosis and lead poisoning. Further, the causes and determinants of these diseases and conditions are frequently multi-factorial and include broad social, economic, and environmental factors such as income, education, and influences associated with where we live, work, learn, and play. Indeed, further progress in promoting the health of all Americans may well depend on an enhanced approach to what constitutes public health practice—one that seeks explicitly to positively affect “upstream” social, economic, and environmental determinants of health.

We know that working on problems whose causes and solutions are unclear requires collaborating with and leading many different groups. This means that the people working in public health from a variety of different professional backgrounds require training that prepares them to deal with this complexity and with the different groups of stakeholders required to collectively address complex public health challenges.

As the Regional Health Administrator for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for Region X in the Northwest part of the United States, I have experience in observing and leading teams of public health professionals to work on major public health issues and have had an opportunity to work with a program that is effective in training students to become impressive and confident practitioners. The MPH in Community-Oriented Public Health Practice program at the University of Washington in Seattle has created a rigorous academic environment that allows students to engage closely with health problems in the community and that teaches students to learn by doing.

Students help our region’s practitioners solve real problems and develop practice skills that will be used every day to move public health teams to take effective data-driven preventive action.

I urge other schools of public health to consider how they can best incorporate the lessons from this effective and inspiring program into their own teaching methods. Such efforts will prepare members of our future workforce for the complex challenges that await them.

Patrick O’Carroll

Regional Health Administrator, Region X U.S. Public Health Service

Seattle, WA

USA iii

Preface

In 2000, I returned to Seattle from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta to work at the University of Washington School of Public Health and Community Medicine. At that time, my UW colleagues made me aware of a remarkable new enterprise: the development of a Master of Public Health program focused on the practice of public health. The MPH in Community-Oriented Public Health Practice (COPHP) would be an unorthodox undertaking for two primary reasons. Firstly, the school had a reputation for training future researchers on the fundamentals of research. Secondly, the group of faculty involved in developing the program had decided to base it on the best principles of adult learning theory, and as a result, they were determined to use the problem-based learning (PBL) method as the program’s anchor. As a life-long practitioner of public health, I was intrigued and hooked. I was pleased to join with several colleagues in a multi-year exploration of how best to design a program for adult learners so that they could enter the employ of a non-profit or government agency or health care institution and “hit the ground running.” Testimonials from employers hiring the graduates of this program as well as from the students themselves have confirmed that, with COPHP, we took the right approach.

This book tells the story of that exploration, our initial program design, and the lessons we learned as faculty and students together re-shaped the program each year to improve the effectiveness of the learning experience. It is directed at all teaching programs that wish to move from conventional methods of teaching and learning, where faculty lectures predominate, to an environment where the faculty craft PBL cases that students use to teach each other; from faculty-governed learning to a shared learning space; and from a knowledge base dominated by theory to one where students discover theory by looking at problems in a practice field. In this book, we provide examples of the PBL cases that faculty have written and used in COPHP courses. A companion project will make the entire set of COPHP PBL cases available for an annual subscription fee (see Appendix L).

The editors and authors of this book understand that it will be the rare program that converts completely from traditional learning methods to PBL. We offer advice and insight into the many aspects of PBL and how, over the years, we have tried to be flexible and pragmatic about its use and interpretation. One of our foremost tenets has been to monitor how both students and faculty have contributed to programmatic quality improvement.

The COPHP program has been fortunate, particularly at its inception, to have the support and vision of leaders in the School of Public Health. COPHP was launched under the direction of Dr. Frederick A. Connell, Associate Dean of the school at the time, who oversaw the first set of PBL cases created from the practice environment and worked through the complexity of wv

training faculty in a new method of teaching. Dr. Connell had the challenging task of turning a start-up into an accepted institutionalized program. His experience as an epidemic intelligence officer and a pediatrician anchored him in the practice world; his academic credentials as a researcher and ties throughout the school’s academic departments helped to assure the program’s successful launch. Dr. Connell now has emeritus status.

After the program was stabilized, I took the leadership reins for three years and was followed by Peter House, a senior lecturer in the Department of Health Services and a clinical associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine. Peter successfully met the challenge of moving the program from partial funding by the State of Washington to complete funding from student tuition. The current COPHP Director, Dr. Amy Hagopian, with research interests in global health around health worker migration from low-income to wealthy countries, has helped expand the program’s annual cohort to three groups of eight students.

COPHP has been fortunate to have strong faculty leadership for each of the required curricular areas. Several of these faculty members—Aaron Katz, Jack Thompson, Fred Connell, and Stephen Gloyd, with support from then Health Services Chair, Bill Dowling—participated in early conversations about developing a program over post-class libations at a nearby cantina. The conversations over time developed into a formal proposal to the School of Public Health that generated the COPHP program.

Case-writing leads for programmatic content in the PBL cases at the beginning of the program include: Management (Bill Dowling); Population Health (Stephen Bezruchka); Community Development (Jack Thompson and Peter House); Epidemiology and Biostatistics (Fred Connell and Jim Gale); Health Promotion/Health Behavior (Karen Hartfield); Policy and Evaluation (Aaron Katz and Amy Hagopian); and Environmental Health (Bill Daniels). Many current faculty members are chapter authors for this book (Sharon Bogan [former student], Brett Niessen [former student], A. Gita Krishnaswamy [former student], Aaron Katz, Amy Hagopian, Peter House, Karen Hartfield, Jsani Henry [former student], Stephen Bezruchka, Ann Vander Stoep, Michelle Garrison, Tania Busch-Isaksen, Wayne Turnberg, Jude Van Buren, Sarah Ross-Viles [former student], Hendrika Meischke, Chris Hurley, Katie Bell, Ian Painter, Jack Thompson).

To credit all who have contributed to the success of COPHP, I should really name the program’s alumni since many of them are substantial contributors to the development and improvement of all aspects of the program. The book chapter on CORE (Anne Althauser, Tara Bostock, Ariel Hart, Jennifer Hagedorn, and Afomeia Tesfai) describes the major contribution that students made to incorporate anti-racism principles into the curriculum.

Thanks to all of the students and faculty who have been a part of COPHP over the years for

UN their energy, enthusiasm, and devotion to learning. This learning community has shared the insights, the joy, and the continuing relationships resulting from many months of hard work.

Bud Nicola

University of Washington School of Public Health Seattle, WA

USA vi

The co-editors would like to thank Alice Porter, manuscript editor, and Sarah Cohen, copy editor, for all their hard work and impressive professional help on this book. Their effort improved the final product immensely.

The enthusiasm and thoughtfulness of COPHP faculty, students, staff, and community partners over the years inspired us to create this resource for other academic public health colleagues.

A. Althauser

K. Bell

S.A. Bezruchka

T. Bostock

T.M. Busch Isaksen

S. Buskin

F.A. Connell

J. Gale

M. Garrison

Kelly Gilmore

Jennifer Hagedorn

Amy Hagopian

Ariel Hart

Jsani Henry

Peter House

Chris Hurley

Aaron Katz

List of Contributors

Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, University of Washington, Seattle, USA

Department of Health Services, Community-Oriented Public Health Practice program, University of Washington School of Public Health, Seattle, USA

Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, University of Washington Medical Center, Seattle, USA

Department of Health Services, Community-Oriented Public Health Practice program, University of Washington School of Public Health, Seattle, USA

Department of Health Services, Community-Oriented Public Health Practice program, University of Washington School of Public Health, Seattle, USA viii

A. Gita Krishnaswamy

Hendrika Meischke Lena Nachand

Bud Nicola

Brett Niessen

Ian Painter

Sarah Ross-Viles

Afomeia Tesfai

Jack Thompson

Wayne Turnberg

Jude Van Buren

Ann Vander Stoep

Department of Health Services, Community-Oriented Public Health Practice program, University of Washington School of Public Health, Seattle, USA

Washington State Health Care Authority, Olympia, USA

Department of Health Services, Community-Oriented Public Health Practice program, University of Washington School of Public Health, Seattle, USA

Dedication

This e-book is dedicated to faculty and teachers from around the world who are searching for effective and exciting ways to improve student learning.

CHAPTER 1 Introduction and Background

Aaron Katz’, Jack Thompson and Frederick A. Connell University of Washington, Seattle, USA

Abstract: Faculty at the University of Washington School of Public Health developed an MPH program that departs significantly from traditional graduate training. They initially sought a pedagogy rooted in adult learning theory and social justice that would prepare courageous problem solvers and excellent critical thinkers. The first step toward this goal was selection of the problem-based learning method to replace the lecture mode. Faculty secured funds to support training in writing PBL cases and facilitating PBL groups, designing a curriculum, and developing administrative processes. They created a two-year curriculum that covers all the core competencies of public health through PBL cases, which are in part shaped by community partners. Fifteen years later, the program that resulted from this effort—the MPH in Community-Oriented Public Health Practice—continues to prepare public health professionals who demonstrate exceptional skills in self-discovery, leadership, teamwork, and collective analysis.

Keywords: Adult learning theory, Community, Curriculum, Critical thinking, Education, MPH, Pedagogy, Practice, Problem-based learning, Public health.

“The key challenge facing public health education today is reconciliation of the academic environment in which most public health education takes place with the practice environment for which students are destined”.

--Who Will Keep the Public Healthy? Educating Public Health Professionals for the 21° Century [1].

How can we train excellent public health practitioners?

* Corresponding author Aaron Katz: University of Washington School of Public Health Seattle, WA, USA; Tel: (206) 616-5227; Fax: (206) 616-9415; E-mail: garlyk@uw.edu

4 Experiential Teaching for Public Health Practice Katz et al.

That was the question that vexed the four founders of COPHP when, 15 years ago, we sat down over bottles of beer. Our public health school at the University of Washington had a strong reputation in public health training and research—it consistently ranked among the top six public health schools in the country. Many of our colleagues were nationally renowned scholars in environmental health, epidemiology, biostatistics, and other fields, and each year the competition to get into our MPH, MS, and PhD programs was intense.

Still, we shared an uneasiness about whether our students, particularly our MPH students, left us well-prepared to work in public health. And our sense of uncertainty was supported by what we heard from the potential employers of our students. These employers—local health departments, health care providers, community organizations, and advocacy groups—sought not just specific research skills or methods expertise but also strong problem-solvers and critical thinkers. They tended to hire students from other disciplines, such as business or health administration, that apparently offered more flexible and applicable skill sets.

So we wondered, what would a curriculum look like that produced creative, courageous problem-solvers who could, according to the WHO definition of public health, help create the “conditions in which people can be healthy?” We were fairly confident that traditional graduate-level courses were unlikely to fit the bill. How does a student learn critical thinking skills by sitting passively in a lecture, watching a continuous stream of bulleted PowerPoint slides? How does a midterm exam or theory-based paper help a student learn the sensitivity and humility needed to work with and in support of communities?

PROBLEM-BASED LEARNING

What we needed was a pedagogy rooted in experiential learning and self-discovery, concepts consistent with adult learning theory [2]. Some of us had used case studies in our courses, placing students in realistic situations and posing questions that pushed them to research contexts, options, and impacts. But each of us has also worked in public health practice, and we knew that real challenges did not come in such neat packages—tarely is anyone around to set the stage or pose

Introduction and Background Experiential Teaching for Public Health Practice 5 the right questions. Once at work, many of our graduates had to gain the knowledge and confidence to start from zero and still find good solutions and effective strategies.

Another goal we had was for students to gain strong skills in teamwork and collective analysis. Certainly public health professionals must conduct independent research and take individual initiative. But public health is at its core a group effort: professionals working in teams, across disciplines, with community groups and stakeholder organizations. We wanted to create an educa-tional environment in which our students learned and excelled at leadership skills, meeting facilitation techniques, respectful criticism, and other competencies needed to contribute to and lead high-performing teams.

Many of us in higher education learned how to teach on the job, with little or no formal training, and with only our own teachers as models; this means that lecture is what we’re comfortable doing. We have confidence that if we design and deliver a lecture effectively, students will hear and “get” what we consider to be the main lessons, skills, and knowledge. This “I talk, you listen” pedagogy is ageold, but the research on adult education suggests that it rarely results in sustained learning [3]. We began to look for an alternative to the lecture model in which the instructor has total control over the content and flow of a session; we sought instead a method of teaching and learning in which the initiative and control would switch to students.

Through some personal contacts and a bit of literature review, we learned about problem-based learning (PBL), a non-didactic learning method that has been used, notably, in various medical schools. As we learned more about this pedagogy, an opportunity to obtain funding from the university administration arose. Backed by our dean’s office, we crafted a successful proposal, which provided support for a year of learning, planning, training, and case-writing.

Finding the right pedagogy was the first step, but only the first, and perhaps the easiest. We faced three main challenges to creating the kind of innovative signature program we envisioned:

6 Experiential Teaching for Public Health Practice Katz et al.

e Firstly, though we had obtained funds, we needed to find expertise to train faculty in writing PBL cases and facilitating PBL groups, to design a curriculum, and to develop all the administrative processes such as admissions, faculty and student support, and evaluation.

Secondly, we needed to recruit faculty to write and lead blocks of cases on major public health competency areas. This is no small task, as PBL is not for everyone. Teaching outside of the lecture mode is neither easy nor comfortable for many academics. Since few if any faculty in our department had any experience with PBL, it took a leap of faith to agree to participate in the new program.

The third challenge was designing a two-year curriculum that included sufficient depth on all the core competencies of public health—from biostatistics to management—through series of cases, each of which would last 1—4 weeks. Traditional MPH programs are an amalgam of individual courses, each addressing one area of competency such as program evaluation, management, or health promotion. Individual instructors are responsible for the content and organization of those courses, with limited attempts to coordinate across them. Starting a PBL program from scratch, we wanted to foster integration across blocks of cases. So, for example, a case on health behavior and prevention reminded students about epidemiology skills and techniques, or a case on health policy reminded them about biostatistical analysis. We believed this multidisciplinary approach to curricular design mirrored the practice environment, where successful public health interventions entailed various types of inquiry, both qualitative and quantitative. We also knew that to be consistent with this pedagogy, we would have to “reinvent” approaches to traditional requirements such as the first-year practicum and the culminating thesis project.

As we discussed our ideas with other faculty, we discovered that one of our new faculty members had direct experience with problem-based learning in his former academic setting. He provided us with good advice from his experience and directed us to national experts in this area. With the planning funds, we were able to hire a staff person who visited the Hahnemann (now Drexel) School of Public Health, which had established an all-PBL MPH program. What she learned on that visit gave us great insight into the process of PBL and the nature of cases that

Introduction and Background Experiential Teaching for Public Health Practice 7 would generate deep learning. We were also able to bring a PBL expert who had worked on the Hahnemann program to our school to train faculty on case writing and PBL facilitation.

Of course, planning and training resources would mean nothing without sufficient faculty to run the various modules for a two-year program. As we discussed our budding idea with colleagues, we found the idea of a cutting-edge MPH program to be very attractive to many; indeed, the program’s focus on public health practice and its basis in adult learning made recruiting faculty with strong practice credentials fairly easy.

COMMUNITY AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

In addition to working with a pedagogy that encourages self-discovery, leadership, and teamwork, we sought to design a program that would adhere to two key principles: application of learning to community settings and a priority focus on social justice and equity. This approach requires a very close involvement with communities served by public health. We were confident that PBL would support identification and discussion of public health competencies in class settings, but we wanted to ensure that our students could demonstrate mastery of specific competencies in work situations.

In this regard, we knew we did not want to follow a traditional approach of public health programs—inviting community leaders to participate in individual class sessions organized by academic faculty. Rather, COPHP faculty would bring experience from and connections with state and local health departments, community organizations, education, housing, and community planning. This wealth of community connections and experience with actual community problem-solving would inform case development and offer opportunities for hands-on class projects.

Our faculty achieve this standard by engaging in dialogue with community leaders prior to case-writing and block development. Today community partners help shape the direction of many of the blocks and even co-write cases with faculty. This is particularly true for those blocks that have direct community interaction as part of the work. Community leaders are also engaged with the program in

8 Experiential Teaching for Public Health Practice Katz et al.

seminar leadership and in service as practicum and capstone advisers. (See Chapter 10.2 on our community development curriculum).

The practicum requirement had to be reconsidered in light of this new curriculum. Our school has a major partner in our local public health department, Public Health—Seattle & King County. Several faculty members either are current health department employees with clinical appointments or are former health department employees now at the university. In 2003, the school and the health department successfully applied to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for pilot funding as an academic health department. One of the lasting benefits of this collaboration was the agreement to hire a health department employee to coordinate a group practicum that would be housed at the health department. We now have an ongoing contractual relationship with this local health department to provide practicum settings and instructional faculty.

The program also emphasizes capstones, rather than traditional theses, as defining projects for the MPH degree. A capstone, like a thesis, is a rigorous, scholarly effort. Unlike a thesis, a capstone requires negotiation with a community partner to develop a project that is of value to the partner. The COPHP program was the first degree program in our school to use the capstone approach. This is consistent with our community focus and has extended our emphasis on application of learning to the program’s culminating project.

The COPHP program has, we believe, fulfilled the vision of its founding faculty. It now has graduated 13 cohorts of highly competent, committed public health professionals who have transmitted the program’s social justice “DNA” into practice at local, state, federal, and international levels; some have even returned to become the next generation of the program’s faculty. Problem-based learning has, indeed, proven to be a pedagogy well-matched to the public health challenges of tomorrow.

The authors confirm that they have no conflict of interest to declare for this publication.

Introduction and Background Experiential Teaching for Public Health Practice 9

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Declared none.

[1] ` Gebbie KM, Rosenstock L, Hernandez LM, Eds. Who will keep the public healthy? Educating public health professionals for the 21“ century. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press 2003.

[2] Walker A, Leary H, Hmelo-Silver C, Ertmer P, Eds. Essential readings in problem-based learning. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press 2015; p. v.

[3] Ibid.

CHAPTER 2 Competencies

Amy Hagopian“ University of Washington, Seattle, USA

Abstract: All MPH programs in the United States seek accreditation by the Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH). CEPH promotes competency-based education, an institutional process that moves education from an emphasis on what academics believe graduates should know (teacher-focused) to an emphasis on what students should be able to do (student and workplace-focused). These competencies are associated with skills that will be demanded of graduates in their public health workplaces. To assess attainment of competencies, faculty must ask students to produce work products that demonstrate skill mastery. In contrast to typical classrooms, the MPH in Community- Oriented Public Health Practice (COPHP) uses problem-based learning (PBL) cases as the method for achieving competencies and creates real partnerships with government public health agencies and community-based organizations to engage students in producing work these organizations really need. The University of Washington adopted a set of MPH competencies in line with CEPH accreditation requirements, and we have mapped COPHP case learning objectives to these competencies. In this chapter, we discuss the evolution of the competency-based approach in our program, offer examples of problem-based cases from our public policy curriculum, and list the competencies that students will attain by the end of their participation in COPHP.

Keywords: Accreditation, Benjamin Bloom, Case learning, Competencies, Council on Education for Public Health, Paulo Freire, Problem-based learning, Skill mastery, Student-centered learning, Systems thinking.

The Community-Oriented Public Health Program (COPHP) is built on the

* Corresponding author Amy Hagopian: University of Washington School of Public Health Seattle, WA, USA; Tel: (206) 616-4989; Fax: (206) 543-3964; E-mail: hagopian@uw.edu

Bud Nicola & Amy Hagopian (Eds.) © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Bentham Science Publishers principle that cases and problems naturally produce competencies in adult learners. Our program’s founders had in mind a revolutionary approach to public health education—one that placed teachers in the role of “problem-posers” rather than collectors and depositors of information in students’ heads. This orientation is based on the work of educational theorists such as Paulo Freire, who advanced and popularized the concept of “problem-posing education” [1], as well as Benjamin Bloom, who categorized and ranked various ways of knowing, valuing, and doing things in an educational context [2]. Bloom and Freire understood that remembering facts and concepts is a fairly low-level cognitive act, one that is easily fulfilled by simply telling students what they need to know. By contrast, to demonstrate competency in a complex field like public health, students must analyze, apply, evaluate, and synthesize information and ideas. In addition, they must apply important public health values, including collective action, to advance social justice and face down power structures that threaten the public’s health.

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Experiential Teaching for Public Health Practice: Using Cases in Problem-Based Learning

About this book

Front matter

Contents

Foreword

Preface

CHAPTER 1 Introduction and Background

CHAPTER 2 Competencies

The end

Experiential Teaching for Public Health Practice: Using Cases in Problem-Based Learning

About this book

Front matter

Contents

Foreword

Preface

CHAPTER 1 Introduction and Background

CHAPTER 2 Competencies

The end

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