About Us

TeachIM.org is a free and public online tool designed to make it easier for internal medicine residents and attendings to provide high yield teaching more often.  It takes considerable time and practice to create effective teaching material.  As a result, many of us miss the opportunities to teach in the moments it would be most impactful.  Additionally, residents often desire more guidance on how to develop content and more opportunities teach it.  These are not only important skills to develop but we also believe that the process of creating and delivering teaching content is when we learn the most.  Unfortunately, without spaced re-enforcement most knowledge from even the best presentations is forgotten within a day.  Our platform address this by providing trainees with universal and immediate access to the same visual frameworks from which they were initially taught.  This allows them to re-apply these concepts in clinical settings, re-enforcing what they have learned and enhancing long-term retention. We also make use of other evidence-based techniques to increase learning, including specific and measurable learning objectives, interactive visual cues and case-based quizzing.

Our posts fall into three different categories, ‘chalk talks', workshops and brief image based cases. Each post provides guidance on how to teach the topic and the materials necessary to do so.  Still, we hope you will adapt and build on them based on your own style and teaching environments.

Chalk Talks (15-45 minutes) – The most unique feature to our platform are the interactive ‘Chalk Talks’.  Each talk provides a conceptual framework for addressing a clinical question that fits into a single visual frame, rather than a series of slides or pages. This allows all discussed content to map onto one fixed space that learners can use to reinforce the concept and easily re-access in the future.  Each talk is designed for teachers to use as-is or adapt as needed.  Information on each post provides guidance on how to stage the teaching session and background information that will help the resident or attending prepare for the talk.  The talks can be projected on a monitor or screen using the interactive PowerPoint or reproduced by hand on a whiteboard/chalkboard.

Chest X-rays (5 minutes) – One image, one teaching point. These brief posts are intended for 5-minute warm-ups before rounds or morning report.

Electrocardiographs (5 minutes) – Again, designed to be a brief single image warm-up to a broader topic or incorporated.  If you are incorporating these posts into a longitudinal curriculum on reading ECGs, we recommend starting with the Introduction to ECGs to orient learners to the same standard methods. 

Point-of-Care Ultrasound (5 minute cases and 20 minute workshops)

Procedures (5 minute videos and 30 minute simulation workshops)

Each format, especially a chalk talk, requires preparation time to become familiar with the material before using it to teach.