To teach communication skills to their fourth-year medical students, Dr. Paul Haidet and colleagues use jazz music.

In their course called “Jazz and the Art of Medicine,” they play two recordings of the same song, “They can’t take that away from me,” sung first by Sarah Vaughan, and then by Billie Holiday. Then they ask the students to discuss each version of the song in small groups to answer the following question:

Which one of these singers would you most like to “be like” as a physician, Sarah Vaughan or Billie Holiday?

In their new study published in the journal Healthcare, Dr. Paul Haidet and colleagues (2017) explain how they draw on jazz styles and improvisation to address the following problem:

Students have been acculturated into a hierarchical environment wherein command and control decision-making is the norm, and many adopt the belief that medicine is characterized by linear, cause and effect problems best solved only by algorithmic and deductive thinking.

So, instead of providing students with lists of best practices and key phrases to memorize and use in conversations with patients, students have the opportunity listen to some of the great voices in jazz music history and learn from them how to improvise.

The authors explain how Jazz provides “a metaphorical frame for student discovery and understanding of improvisational communication processes.”

This includes the use of silence, pacing, communication latencies (the time between turns at talk)—what I would call “pause time”—and open-ended questions, “all aligned toward having a good improvisation process with patients.”

By comparing and contrasting the style of such different jazz singers as Sarah Vaughan and Billie Holiday, among a variety of other jazz singers and musicians, students learned how to listen for deeper meanings in patients’ communications, and they developed their own authentic voices as communicators.

Now it’s your turn to try this self-assessment exercise for yourself.

Listen to the following two recordings of the same song, “They can’t take that away from me,” sung first by Sarah Vaughan, and then by Billie Holiday.

Compare and contrast their singing styles according to your interpretation of what you think the song is about.

Then ask yourself which one of these singers you would most like to “be like” as a communicator.

My choice is clear.

What about yours?

Haidet, P., Jaracke, J. Yang, C., Teal, C., Street Jr., R., and Stuckey, H. (2017). Using Jazz as a metaphor to teach improvisational communication skills. Healthcare, 5, 41