This month, the ANA talks with this year’s recipient of the Distinguished Neurology Teacher Award, Ann Poncelet, MD, FAAN. Dr. Poncelet is the William G. Irwin Endowed Chair and Director of the Haile T. Debas Academy of Medical Educators at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where she supports educators and the education mission at UCSF. Dr. Poncelet talks about her experience as an educator, the future of neurology education, and what it means for her to be named a distinguished educator.
What notable experience or experiences have shaped your career as an educator?
I was a medical student at UCSF, and one of my first teachers was Dan Lowenstein, who is just a remarkable and inspirational teacher, researcher, and clinician. So that was the beginning of being inspired around education.
As I moved on, through residency, fellowship, and into being a faculty, I had the opportunity to work with master clinicians like Robert Layzer, Anne Louis, and Richard Olney. I was able to do my EMG Fellowship at Mayo Clinic in Rochester. That program really was one of the first places I worked that really incorporated the learning sciences into education. That really influenced my own approach as an educator.
I was sponsored by my department and the deans of the medical school to do the Harvard Macy Program for physician educators. And that course just changed my life. I had no idea as a physician that there was a whole science and theoretical framework behind education, that there were people who did this as a career. So that really gave me the kind of theoretical and literature-based anchor around how you do education and how you teach. Then I started to have questions about curricular design, or how people learn. I've had the opportunity to be partnered with a couple of PhD educators at UCSF, Bridget O'Brien and Arianna Teherain. They taught me again about the theoretical frameworks you apply to an education research project, how to ask a good question, how to do qualitative analysis, which I've never done before. So that really opened a path around education research that really transformed my practice.
What changes have you seen in neuroscience education, and what factors will influence the future of neurology education?
I’m a clinician-educator. So, my work is mostly in the clinical venue. I'm still very deeply a believer in having good clinical skills, especially as a muscular specialist. I make treatment decisions based on my exam, and the exam is essential to the diagnosis of the kinds of diseases that I see. Now we see a beautifully evolving armamentarium of diagnostic approaches that can help support that. I really believe that our learners need to have foundational skills to be good doctors. And the other is that having relationships over time between the learners and their patients and preceptors are important for skills development, professional development, and professional identity formation. We want to encourage our learners to want to choose neurology and/or neuroscience as a career. Longitudinal models give us the opportunity to partner them with successful academic neurologists and get excited about a career in neuroscience and I think those relationships are so important.
Another part of the future is regarding how we educate our learners. Web technologies, simulation, and virtual reality allows us to train our learners in a more enhanced way that really complements the bedside learning and complements their ability to learn directly from their teachers, but also be able to practice without putting patients at risk, for example. So that's been really exciting and it’s only going to get more exciting.
What does being named a Distinguished Educator mean to you?
When I started as a junior faculty, education was something you did on top of your day job. You did it out of service to your department, out of passion, because you love education, which is how I got drawn into it, and I really felt a commitment to education. But nobody got promoted or recognized as an educator. It was not a viable career path for an academic. You did basic science and were productive and creative in that space or created/led academic clinical programs.
I was the first in my department to be promoted as an educator, the first to become a full professor as an educator. So, to have national recognition as a Distinguished Educator is really meaningful to me, because I did a lot of this without knowing if there would be any reward or if I was kind of undermining my own career by pursuing this passion.
For me personally, this recognition is meaningful. But it also signals to a new generation of neurologists and neuroscientists that there is a path for success in education, that this is a journey they can undertake and achieve excellence and have an impact that is meaningful within their own institutions and beyond.
How has the ANA supported your career and/or work?
I have to say that the most important impact for me is the community of educators. There is an incredible network of neurology educators both at the undergraduate level and the graduate level. I've been supported by neurology leadership as well. This community has really mentored me in my journey as an educator, sponsored me for leadership roles and recognition such as this award. These collaborations as we've come up together as educators have really allowed us to collaborate, to do projects together, and to share best practices. So, I think that this national network is just so important.