Table 2 Resident attitudes and experience with Bite-Sized Teaching from qualitative data

Components of Bite-Sized Teaching

Multiple, brief talks

PGY2: “It’s what medical education should be. Nobody in medical school can pay attention for 4 h straight … In residency, our attention is even more divided. Topics should go no longer than 30 min at a time. So the 8-min lecture is ideal.”

PGY2: “When it’s only 8 min, people will pay attention for the whole 8 min. It really forces you to be on your game, make everything count.”

PGY3: “As someone who gets his phone out frequently during conference, the frequency that I do that during BST is much lower. Part of that is that the topics are interesting, part of it is the voice is changing every 8 min. I get itchy watching people stand up and talk for an hour. And they’ve lost me at 12:07. Like, I have completed the Internet by 1 PM.”

Content

PGY1: “Bite-size information is easy to digest, sticks well during a busy day.”

PGY2: “High yield information, relevant and not too much detail, makes it more manageable.”

PGY3:” I just want to know what I need to know. Like when we have 45-min presentations and like half of them are this study, I will tune out and get lost. BST is great for getting rid of that. Distilling out.”

Presentation & delivery

PGY3: “Succinctness of the presentation is the most important thing. All that needed be ingested was a sentence as opposed to a paragraph or literally an entire slide of words. Use (visual aids) to amplify key points. Because if there’s not a lot on there, the audience doesn’t have to digest very much.”

PGY3:” Delivery is key. It’s delivered in a way that no other talks are delivered. It’s not formal and not a lot of studies, graphs and charts. It’s like you’re teaching somebody”

Peer Teaching

PGY2: “If I know that it’s something that can be understood by someone at my level, I feel like that’s knowledge that I should have ... As opposed to someone who’s been studying something for longer than I have been alive, and they drop some knowledge, I’m not sure I need to know that.”

PGY2: “Excellent way to learn and teach (And learn how to teach!) … and I love that we are motivated by the fact that we present to our peers and they do depend on the knowledge we share to be applicable and accurate. Overall, they are usually very well done- and that expectation remains for most people when they attend.”

PGY3: “You buy into it because it’s your peer.”

Experience

Speaker experience

PGY3: “it helped me sharpen my public speaking, identify relevant aspects of clinical teaching and made me an expert in the subject I was teaching.”

PGY3: “Made me learn the content because to bring something (down) to what you absolutely need to know, you need to know it well, to really respect what is the most vital thing.”

Overall experience

PGY3: “BST mode is an excellent format, with a built-in structure that guides the speaker to adopt more engaging styles and better identify the learning points relevant to the listener, presented in a format well-suited to integrating this information. It is a highlight of our conferences at this institution.”