Ask CME Learners About the Task Before Their Generation

When a faculty member says a learner needs a different approach because they belong to Gen Z, the CME team has a useful follow-up: what happened in the teaching encounter, and what does the learner need help doing?

The generation label may open a conversation about unfamiliar experiences. It does not identify the educational problem by itself. A request for clearer feedback, difficulty with a new clinical task, and lack of time to prepare call for different responses, even when the learners share a birth cohort.

Two conversations from early September make that distinction tangible. In the Academic Medicine Podcast's September 7 episode, a faculty advisor reads a personal essay about learning students' expressions and adapting communication while appreciating their support for one another. The audio revisits an essay already published in the journal; it is a story about an advising relationship, not a comparison establishing how a generation learns.

In HOPA Now's September 8 conversation, participants discuss variation in preceptors' feedback. One account describes the difficulty of moving between blunt feedback and a softer approach that can leave the message unclear. These are participants' experiences in oncology pharmacy training, not measured differences between generations. For faculty development, the actionable question is whether the learner can understand the correction.

The label leaves several explanations unresolved

The National Academies' 2020 consensus review of generations in the workforce cautions against using generational categories to guide workforce management. Differences observed between younger and older people may reflect aging and experience. Differences between young people studied in different years may reflect changes affecting society more broadly. Much of the reviewed research could not distinguish those explanations from birth-cohort effects.

The report also emphasizes variation within a generation and recommends attending to individual needs and the context of work. Its scope is workforce management; it does not test a CME teaching intervention. For a CME faculty-development team, it supports caution about the explanation, rather than supplying a preferred teaching technique.

That leaves room to take differences seriously. A clinician's training experiences, current responsibilities, familiarity with a task, and opportunities to practice may matter. Ask about those conditions directly before turning a broad category into an instructional rule.

Rework one faculty-development exercise

Consider a constructed workshop case: a preceptor reports that a younger learner seems disengaged after feedback. Instead of asking participants how to teach that generation, ask what they would need to find out before responding.

What did the preceptor observe? What did the learner understand the feedback to mean? Could the learner name the part of the task needing correction? Was there an opportunity to attempt it again?

Those answers can change the response. Unclear feedback calls for a specific explanation tied to the observed task. A learner who understands the correction but has not practiced it needs an opportunity to try. A participation constraint needs its own conversation. None of those needs can be read from a generation label.

Our earlier discussion of giving shared faculty time a distinct job offers a place for this exercise: colleagues can compare what they would ask and rehearse a response. The rural program examples in that article inform the use of shared time; they do not validate this proposed exercise or generational tailoring.

The faculty-development lead can give participants one final task: rewrite their initial explanation using an observation, a question for the learner, and a teaching response they could reconsider after the next encounter. This is a planning recommendation, not a claim of improved learning. It makes the next conversation depend on something the faculty member can actually learn about the person in front of them.