One of the many remarkable aspects of the Harvard Macy Institute (HMI) community is our diverse nature. Within this community, educators, clinicians, and leaders from many fields and nations come together with shared goals: to transform health professions education and positively impact patient care. This engagement across perspectives offers extraordinary opportunities to break down barriers and spark innovation. But to fully unlock our potential, we must be intentional about how we communicate.
Conversations in medical and health professions education often become siloed by acronyms, jargon, and field-specific language, a challenge common across higher education. While such specificity may foster precision and a sense of identity within disciplines, it can also hinder collaboration and engagement with those whose insights are essential for addressing complex challenges. A 2022 content analysis of health professions literature highlighted our lack of clear consensus on the term "faculty" itself, showing how inconsistent terminology can disrupt communication and hinder scholarly progress. Clearer, more inclusive language is necessary to promote cross-disciplinary collaboration and true innovation.
As a simple assessment-specific example, consider the challenge of preparing students for licensing exams. This is a shared struggle across professions, yet when we invoke terms like USMLE, COMLEX, NCLEX, NPTE, or AMC without context, we unintentionally impose boundaries. When we do this, we risk closing conversations to those unfamiliar with our specific shorthand—losing opportunities to learn from each other’s expertise and experiences.
The Harvard Macy Institute offers us a unique opportunity to transcend these boundaries. Systems thinking is an approach to understanding and solving problems by viewing them as part of a larger, interconnected system. One key aspect of systems thinking is the integration of diverse perspectives to address complex problems. Effective collaboration requires the ability to “communicate across disciplines” and to “take advantage of a broad range of concepts, principles, models, methods, and tools—because any one view is inevitably wrong.”
This approach is endorsed and reflected by the HMI Community as a whole and is a central component of the "Evaluation and Assessment: Systems Thinking in Health Professions Education" course. Greg Britton, Editorial Director at Johns Hopkins University Press, advises that authors aiming to make an impact with a broad audience should focus on “explaining up” rather than “talking down.” This approach involves removing barriers to critical engagement with their work by minimizing the use of field-specific jargon. This reframing is particularly important in spaces like HMI, where collaboration, growth, and collective problem-solving are key to success.
Explaining up—using inclusive, broad language—can help us all to leverage the full power of this community. It is about framing conversations in ways that invite participation, creating spaces where no one feels excluded by unfamiliar terms. It is a practice that aligns deeply with the values of the Harvard Macy Institute: fostering proximity, familiarity, and shared goals that transcend professional and national boundaries. Sometimes our full participation requires stepping out of our disciplinary comfort zones, but doing so unlocks ideas and solutions we couldn’t achieve alone. Explaining up may take a little more time and intentionality, but it is a small investment with big rewards.
Lauren Germain, Ph.D., M.Ed.
