DorothyFinkelLaverty


 * Understanding By Design Lesson Template**

· What is meant by professional behavior in a medical office · What behaviors are appropriate when interacting with outside vendors · Good verbal communication skills · When to involve your supervisor |||| * What does professionalism mean? If I apologize for bad behavior, it makes it OK that I did it. If I am pushed too much, it is OK to lash out – I can’t be expected to not express myself, can I? || Students will know… |||||| ** Skills ** Students will be able to… ||
 * **Title of Lesson** |||| Professional Behavior in a Medical Office: Interacting with Vendors || **Grade Level** |||| 12+ ||
 * **Curriculum Area** |||| Medical Assistant: MA101: Medical Ethics Unit (4 weeks) || **Time Frame** |||| Week 3 of the course. 1.5 hrs each day, Mon, Wed, Fri ||
 * **Developed By** |||||||||| Dorothy Finkel-Laverty ||
 * ** Identify Desired Results (Stage 1) ** ||
 * ** Content Standards ** ||
 * Students will learn the components of professional behavior and will behave in a professional manner. ||
 * ** Understandings ** |||||| ** Essential Question(s) ** ||
 * **Overarching Understanding** |||| **Overarching** || **Topical** ||
 * Students will understand . ..
 * How does a professional Medical Assistant behave on the job?
 * How does a Medical Assistant blend ethical standards with patient needs? || * What are the components of professional behavior a Medical Assistant would display in terms of vendor interaction?
 * What are the components of professional behavior a Medical Assistant would display in terms of communication with their supervisor? ||
 * **Related Misconceptions** ||
 * I don’t have to behave professionally when I am a student.
 * ** Knowledge **
 * * That there is a wide variety of accepted behavior in medical offices when dealing with vendors
 * How to discuss expectations and concerns with their supervisor concerning vendor interactions
 * How to effectively speak with a vendor who is moving into some of the inappropriate areas |||||| * Differentiate between appropriate and inappropriate gratuities and behaviors from vendors
 * Determine when it is appropriate to ask for assistance from a supervisor
 * Let the vendors know when their behavior is inappropriate, and ask for the appropriate behavior ||
 * ** Assessment Evidence (Stage 2) ** ||
 * ** Performance Task Description ** ||
 * **Goal** |||||||||| During their course of studies, over 8 months, students will work to discover what the qualities are which make up professional behavior. In this course, they examine Medical Ethics. In this unit, they will further examine the subset of those qualities that are related to dealing with vendors. ||
 * **Role** |||||||||| Medical Assistant in a Medical Office (2 to 5 years’ experience) ||
 * **Audience** |||||||||| Their Supervisor ||
 * **Situation** |||||||||| A patient in your office has recently lost her medical insurance, and she no longer has prescription coverage. She has told you, but asked you not to tell anyone else. She has processed the paperwork, and should get her coverage reinstated in six weeks, but she has no more medication left. There is a Pharmaceutical rep who has been trying to get in to see your doctor, and his company produces the medication that this woman needs. You cannot give her any sample medications without the doctor’s approval, of course, but the new rep is willing to give you enough medicine for this patient if you can get him in to see the doctor. The only way you can do this is to cancel an appointment with a rep from another company who has been servicing your office for many years. ||
 * **Product/Performance** |||||||||| Students will write an essay discussing the issues identified in this case scenario, and will propose three different solutions in the essay. They will be prompted with questions such as: What are the ethical issues in this case? What is your office’s responsibility to the long-standing relationship with the second rep? What is your office’s obligation to your patient? What lines of communication do you have available to you? What obligations do you have to your patient to help her get the medication she needs? ||
 * **Standards** |||||||||| A rubric will be developed which examines whether the student has addressed the question from the perspectives of the office, the patient, and the vendor(s). Varying levels of empathy, honesty, communication with supervisors, and communication with vendors will be evaluated in the rubric. Each of the three solutions will be examined for these aspects. The student’s ability to assume the role of the experienced Medical Assistant will also be examined. ||
 * ** Other Evidence ** ||
 * ** Learning Plan (Stage 3) ** ||
 * ** Where are your students headed? Where have they been? How will you make sure the students know where they are going?** |||||||| This unit is part of a course that includes Medical Ethics, and follows a unit in which the students explored other ethical issues in the Medical Assistant field, focusing on HIPAA and patient rights and privacy. It is part of an overall series of professionalism topics woven throughout the five theoretical courses that they take in their second first five months of study at Anthem Institute, and precedes their three clinical courses and their externship. We expect that this series of lessons will better help them to gradually change their behavior to that of a professional Medical Assistant. ||
 * **How will you hook students at the beginning of the unit?** |||||||| “Several of the case studies we look at in this segment are based on real issues raised by our students at their own extern sites. While we can’t possibly examine //everything// that you might encounter as a Medical Assistant extern, I hope that you will learn to examine the issues highlighted in the case studies, and will come to recognize the overall guidelines. I hope that when you encounter an issue in your externship, or on the job, you are able to identify the similarities in that situation with something that you have studied in school. I also want you realize that you will have emotional reactions to some of the things that will happen to you on the job, and that you learn that you don’t have to go with your emotional reaction, but can slow down your reactions so that you have time to let the professional behavior emerge. And finally, I hope that you learn that while we all learn from our mistakes, we don’t have to make all the mistakes ourselves in order to learn from those mistakes, but we can also learn from the mistakes of others!” ||
 * **What events will help students experience and explore the big idea and questions in the unit? How will you equip them with needed skills and knowledge?** |||||||| By continuing to build a library of case studies from which to teach the professionalism segments in the courses. As I hear stories from our externs and graduates, I will be writing them up as case studies, so that each instructor can pick and choose the ones they want to use. In order for this to happen, the questions explored in the case studies must include acknowledgement of feelings that come along with the job. ||
 * **How will you cause students to reflect and rethink? How will you guide them in rehearsing, revising, and refining their work?** |||||||| By giving them case studies based on real externship experiences, they will consider that this could happen to them. As they go through the series of professionalism lessons over the period of five months, they should get better at recognizing the overriding professionalism issues. ||
 * **How will you help students to exhibit and self-evaluate their growing skills, knowledge, and understanding throughout the unit?** |||||||| Any student disagreements or arguments should be mediated with this learning series in mind. Other staff (counselor, Student Services, Career Services) at Anthem Institute must be exposed to this series of lessons through in-services, meetings, and memos. Staff has been trained to recognize improvements in students’ behavior as it occurs, and to comment to the student on the improvements; this should be reinforced with the staff during any training on this topic. ||
 * **How will you tailor and otherwise personalize the learning plan to optimize the engagement and effectiveness of ALL students, without compromising the goals of the unit?** |||||||| The case studies will be discussed at the appropriate level – sometimes, they will be discussed by students in their first month of school, other times, by students in their fifth month. The teacher must be the barometer of what level of discussion is appropriate, and to take the discussion to that level. ||
 * **How will you organize and sequence the learning activities to optimize the engagement and achievement of ALL students?** |||||||| Each course (4-week period) will include a presentation of the professionalism topics by the teacher, research by the students to expand their knowledge, writing by the student each week to help them to think through and internalize the essential questions, and a comparison of the writing that they did in the first week of their studies as opposed to the last weeks of their studies. Possibly have the students put their essays into a portfolio could do this. ||
 * **How will you organize and sequence the learning activities to optimize the engagement and achievement of ALL students?** |||||||| Each course (4-week period) will include a presentation of the professionalism topics by the teacher, research by the students to expand their knowledge, writing by the student each week to help them to think through and internalize the essential questions, and a comparison of the writing that they did in the first week of their studies as opposed to the last weeks of their studies. Possibly have the students put their essays into a portfolio could do this. ||

From: Wiggins, Grant and J. Mc Tighe. (1998). //__Understanding by Design__//, Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development ISBN # 0-87120-313-8 (ppk)

Learning Activities:
 * Teacher presents Medical Ethics from the Kinn’s book. Assignment Day 1: read pages xx to yy
 * Kinn’s workbook pages xx to yy
 * Identifying qualities of professionalism:
 * Working in groups of 3 to 4 students, brainstorm with your group to identify qualities that you believe help to define professional behavior in a Medical Assistant
 * Working independently, research job openings for Medical Assistants, using the Internet or print ads. Find at least 5 advertisements that list professional behavior skills and qualities, and make a list of those qualities.
 * Working independently, using a search engine, students query //professionalism ”medical assistant”// or other terms and see what other attributes you can find. Some good articles:
 * []
 * []
 * Applying those qualities to scenarios:
 * Teacher will spend a few minutes helping students figure out what we mean by vendors, and the various vendor relationships that a medical office will have (Pharmaceutical representatives, office supply companies, medical supply companies, laboratories, package delivery & pickup companies, caterers, uniform providers, etc.)
 * Get back together with same groups as earlier – using the 3 lists you have compiled, pull out those qualities that are related to //working with vendors// or //communicating with supervisors// in a medical office
 * Teacher distributes case studies; each group has a different case study. Each group reads the case study, and discusses the ethical and communication concerns and issues. A leader is selected, and the group presents the case study to the class. Either a team member or the teacher makes notes on the board. Be careful to ensure the order of presentation makes sense – some of the case studies are variations on one another, and need to be presented in the simplest-to-most-complex order to bring out the points well.

How was it creating this lesson? What difficulties did you encounter? Did you like the format? What are additional questions you now have? I really liked this approach. In the past, I have gotten caught up in creating “cute” activities that keep the students engaged, but don’t end up with something that we can assess. Frequently, I was working with assessments that have been created by our home office in Phoenix. I liked the freedom of developing my own assessments, and have the freedom to make it other than totally objectives (multiple choice, t/f, and matchings). It was a lot of work, but I think that I could go in and modify this lesson plan, keeping the same overarching question, changing the topical questions, and have a well-coordinated Professionalism course that meets our needs. Difficulties: just not a traditional method of learning for me, but it actually fits in with a lot of the reading that I did in preparation of this document. I read a bit, tried a bit, evaluated (assessed?) my work, and reiterated. The format is similar to lesson planning that I have done in the past, just filled in the boxes in a reverse order. I really liked that aspect of it.

// Dorothy- I enjoyed looking at your UBD unit. This is a very important aspect of the medical profession and your assessment structure allows you to determine how they would react to a real life scenario in the workplace. One thought I had was that the students could actually invent their own scenario and then respond to how they would react to it through the essay. This would allow you to assess that they understand they kind of scenarios that they may encounter and will also be another added creative component to the assignment. - Tiffany Treni //