Jessica Walters, MD, recognized for teaching
Jessica Walters always imagined she’d be a high school teacher when she was growing up in Cincinnati. She enjoyed working with kids as a gymnastics coach. As an undergrad at Indiana University, she majored in biology. And with a little help from her mom, a Cincinnati Children’s nurse, she was able to do summer research for several years in the Division of Hematology/Oncology.
“After graduating high school, I started taking education classes, and I realized that I liked the science itself much more than the teaching, so I shifted gears,” Walters recalled. “My love of kids and science led me to consider a career in medicine.”
Walters’ decision was helped along by her time at Cincinnati Children’s, where she was able to shadow providers and attend Tumor Board meetings.
“I got to see all the physicians working together to help one kid,” she said, “and it humbled me to realize that one individual doctor doesn’t have to know everything. It’s really a team-based approach, supported by the hospital’s considerable resources. It helped me understand I could do it. I could be a pediatrician.”
Today, Walters is a staff physician in the Pediatric Primary Care Center (PPC) at Burnet Campus. Ironically, she is fulfilling her original dream of teaching by educating medical students and residents who rotate through the clinic. She’s done such a good job of it, in fact, that she was honored with the Ray Baker Teaching Award at the Cincinnati Pediatric Society’s Fall Dinner on November 18.
“I teach the medical students based on the patients they see,” she explained. “I also teach them about the style of medicine—how to write a note, how to give good presentations. For the residents, I do case-based teaching, but I also teach them how to teach, how to simplify the material and make it real by showing how it applies to patient care.”
Walters says she learns as much, if not more, from the medical students and residents as she teaches them. “We look up stuff together, we’re opening books together. We ask colleagues for their opinion. It’s just a big circle of teaching in our clinic,” she said.
Winning the Ray Baker Teaching Award came as a surprise and a huge honor, she said. “It was definitely a confidence-booster. I’m pretty lucky to work in a great clinic with so many different physicians where it’s okay to ask questions. I’m constantly learning from them how to be a better teacher, so I’m in a good spot.”
