How SEL Transformed My Pre-Med Course

Key Points

• Healthcare providers face many stressors in their work, and SEL can help them develop critical skills such as resilience, self-reflection, empathy, and teamwork.
• A veteran professor describes how he has integrated SEL into one of his undergraduate pre-med courses, supporting the development of well-prepared healthcare professionals and forging lifelong bonds among students.

In the fall of 2022, I was faced with a particular challenge. As a professor at The University of Texas at Austin, I’m charged with helping to guide undergraduates interested in preparing for careers in the medical healthcare profession. Pre-med coursework is challenging at any time, but my students bore an additional burden: They had endured the trauma of COVID lockdown. Many were experiencing anxiety, depression, loneliness, and academic disengagement.

That term, I was scheduled to teach my 16-student seminar introducing college freshmen to medical humanities and ethics, titled “The Healer, The Patient, The Society, The Culture.” The course introduces the interdisciplinary study of healthcare and the many potential roles of the healthcare provider, public intellectual, ethicist, community leader, and healthcare advocate.

The course was valuable, I knew, but I also felt my students at this time needed more. That’s why I turned to social and emotional learning (SEL). My students not only built skills critical to the profession, such as empathy, reflection, and resiliency, but they also formed a supportive and lasting community with one another.

Adding SEL to the Equation

To help meet my students’ needs, I decided to completely integrate SEL with my course’s content. I believed that this integration would offer the students a chance to learn and practice self-reflection and teamwork. This was a valuable complement to the interdisciplinary work that was already at the heart of the course. My course offered students the opportunity to incorporate other areas of study—the humanities, such as literature, history, visual art, poetry, and drama—to the way that a good healthcare provider thinks about their work and their interactions with patients.

In the first class meeting, I introduced my students to SEL and explained why I felt it had a place in this course. I told my students that such self-reflective practice should always be a part of the way a provider thought about their work, and for that reason I was integrating that practice into my course. I added that self-reflection allows a provider to be more resilient in their professional and personal life, and that I knew that healthcare providers needed a capacity for resilience because their ability to practice ethical healthcare was in peril.

Drawing From Personal Experience

After this brief orientation to the course, we devoted three class meetings reviewing sections of my memoir, A Culture of Care: A Reflection on Doctoring and Teaching. We focused on sections about my college years so that the students could hear my reflections on my life during a time to which they could personally relate.

One focus of the memoir is on the importance for me, a doctor, to engage with the humanities as a cornerstone for my medical practice, and my practice of self-reflection. After listening to my memoir, the students wrote their own self-reflective essays on why they wanted to become healthcare providers, in light of their own life experiences. These essays demonstrated the students’ empathy for themselves and others, and were a catalyst that promoted bonding in the group.

Wide-Ranging Inspiration for Introspection

The course progressed. We read Polio: An American Story, a book by David Oshinsky that recounts the story of the polio terror and of the intense effort to find a cure, and the students wrote self-reflective essays on their own epidemic experiences during COVID. They connected with one another as they wrote and shared their essays, shed tears together about pandemic losses, and in deeper ways demonstrated empathy for each other.

We visited our university’s art museum, and the students created visual self-portraits; after studying poetry, they wrote self-reflective poems. All of this was shared. We had a unit on drama and students then wrote and performed their own plays about their healthcare experiences. These exercises all resulted in further introspection for each student, and bonding among the students characterized by empathy for each other.

Deepening and Lasting Relationships

Students began to meet independently of course requirements. These meetings continued for more than a year after the course ended, and still continue. The students created a community that encouraged each other to look inward with empathy for themselves and relate to each other empathetically. Their relationships as group members promotes resiliency in each of them. They told me that they had never had a previous course in high school or college where they were encouraged to practice introspection, and they emphasized how valuable to their friendships and their own resilience was their newly learned capacity for introspection.

In reflecting on what I have created in the course, I realize that the way I work as a psychiatrist and the way I teach have merged over the six decades of my professional life, that there is overlap in what I try to create in both settings. It is a culture of care that promotes teamwork between teacher and student, psychiatrist and patient, and among students in my seminar, a culture that supports empathy that each participant experiences for themselves, and for everyone else in the group. To me that is the essence of SEL.

The views in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of CASEL.

Stephen Sonnenberg is a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, professor at The University of Texas at Austin teaching pre-healthcare undergraduates medical humanities and ethics, a public intellectual, and a healthcare and education activist. He leads an undergraduate interdisciplinary program in medical humanities at Texas titled “The Joe W. Bratcher III Patients, Practitioners, and Cultures of Care Bridging Disciplines Program.”

Related Posts:

• 5 Stories About How SEL Builds a Foundation for the Future
• Roundup: 11 Blogs Showcasing SEL in Unexpected Places
• From Classroom to Career—Why SEL Skills Matter Everywhere

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