Feedback Integration

End-of-module feedback surveys are one of the many ways to submit feedback regarding the Gateway Curriculum. These anonymous surveys are completed at the end of each module and are extremely comprehensive. They allow you to write as much as you want about the lecturers, general module organization, workload, required events, or anything else that comes to mind. Overall, I appreciate that WashU Med actively seeks student feedback to continuously improve the Gateway Curriculum!

If you’re so inclined, you can comment on the lectures you receive in real-time and provide critical feedback. A lecture was fantastic? A lecture was not as engaging as you would like? Something specific could have done better? Let your professors know! Believe it or not, they care about your feedback and are making consistent revisions to improve the curriculum for you and future classes.

Personally, I loved being a module liaison because the position put me at the interface between students, module leads, and academic deans. Generally, one to two students are designated as module liaisons for each of the seven modules in Phase One. As a module liaison, one of my roles was to communicate to my peers which specific areas or lectures the module leads were looking for feedback on. However, the bulk of the work comes from collecting overall student feedback on content and teaching. I created student surveys and interviews, generated a report summarizing student feedback with proposed solutions, and met with the module leads and academic deans to share this information with them. It’s exciting to be able to represent the thoughts of my peers regarding the Gateway Curriculum by sharing their feedback with the module leads and deans who create the curriculum. These conversations will hopefully create improvements that positively impact the classes that come after us!

On all of our exam questions, we have the option to leave feedback as we take our exams. Whether we have lingering questions about the wording of a question stem or want to further elaborate on how we came to our answer, we can quickly type some notes in the feedback box. The great thing is, since we have plenty of time to take our exams, we won’t run out of time as we offer our real-time feedback. Once our professors start grading our exams, they will see the comments on any of the questions on which we provide feedback. At our proctored reviews (dedicated times where we can review what we missed on an exam), we will see if they have inserted a response to our feedback. Overall, the real-time feedback is helpful because we don’t have to try to remember what our feedback was as we wait two or so weeks to get our exams back. Instead, we can provide the feedback during the exam and have one less thing to remember as we begin studying for the next exam!

As a thread liaison, you will work with the thread leads throughout all of Phase One to help interpret feedback and provide suggestions on behalf of your classmates. This is an amazing opportunity to interact with faculty members and have a positive impact on the curriculum for years to follow. As a Health, Equity, and Justice thread liaison, I have already had opportunities to contribute to new components. It is empowering to help deliver feedback from my classmates directly to the thread leads and be able to peek behind the scenes to learn how the feedback is considered. I’ve seen how much the leads value student input to create the best curriculum possible, and I feel fortunate to be a part of that for Phase One. If you’re interested in how medical school education is designed, or just love brainstorming complex topics, I highly encourage you to consider being a thread liaison.