The Ethics of Teaching: Critical Thinking and Reflection to Promote Professionalism by Mitigating Biases Including those against other Healthcare Professions

In the USA I see bumper stickers and t-shirts that declare " Critical thinking: the other national deficit. " Unfortunately here, and elsewhere in the world, these words are often true. Not only does the internet give us ample opportunity to express ourselves without much reflection or thought, but college and university courses do not always expect and foster critical thinking and reflection on the part of students, particularly when the courses have lecture formats and large enrollments. In my view, this is especially true of the basic and even the clinical sciences in healthcare professional education. Many of the latter educators do not heed well the admonition in McKeachie's Teaching Tips (McKeachie and Svinicki, 2014) " Teach your students to reflect both in and out of class. That reflection should never stop, because conscious reflection on values is perhaps the cornerstone of the ethics of teaching. " But why is such thought and reflection important in education? Major struggles for all people are the biases and judgments they hold against others especially those outside their own personal groups. For example, in the New York Times a couple of years ago, Kristof (2014) wrote in his editorial " Some readers collectively hissed after I wrote a week ago about the need for early-childhood interventions to broaden opportunity in America. I focused on a 3-year-old boy in West Virginia named Johnny Weethee whose hearing impairment had gone undetected, leading him to suffer speech and development problems that may dog him for the rest of his life. A photo of Johnny and his mom, Truffles Weethee, accompanied the column and readers honed in on Truffles' tattoos and weight (instead of possible opportunities to help Johnny and other such children)...Why didn't readers see a caring mom instead of her.. . tattoos? " We believe that such biases can be mitigated through exposure of students in our courses to people outside their groups especially when the students then write critical reflections about their experiences. Our evidence, from surveys of healthcare professional students (as well as from using formally validated instruments as discussed below), indicates that such activities by students in interdisciplinary teams seem to mitigate biases not only against patients but also against other healthcare professions. For example, 76% of medical students agreed whereas only 10% disagreed with the survey statement " Encounters with people in our team community service project helped me to …