What I Learned By Building The Protected Airway Collaborative
By Jonathan St George, MD
An Origin Story
I have always been passionate about medical education. But it wasn’t until I faced a complex airway case that I truly grasped the wide-ranging, intricate concepts and skills required to master airway management. That experience (confronting a failed airway) exposed something unsettling in my training. It had been solid, but gaps remained. Gaps in integrating knowledge, gaps in preparing for the human factors that surface when lives are on the line. The moment I lost the airway, I realized I was living through something no simulation, no lecture, had fully prepared me for. I was fortunate that day. It could have ended very differently.
After that, the drive to build better approaches to airway management and education became my creative sandbox. I started by redesigning my airway cart. Then I spent four years teaching an airway course — a space to experiment, test, and shape what I hoped could become a truly transformational approach to teaching airway management.
We began with the standard tools: lectures, small groups, and deliberate practice. Then, we layered on simulations, gamification challenges, escape-the-room exercises, interactive quizzes, jeopardy games, and even early AR tools.
Why Traditional Medical Education Falls Short
At first, these innovations were driven by a simple hunger: I needed to bring together all the complex concepts, hands-on skills, and human factors that define airway management. But I quickly discovered the existing medical education toolbox couldn’t deliver: everything was too siloed, too fragmented. Something was missing. I had believed that technology and the latest teaching trends might fill that gap. But they didn’t. Sure, younger learners sometimes enjoyed the novelty, but too often it felt hollow, as if the tech and games were designed to trick learners into wanting to learn, like hiding a bitter-tasting supplement inside a brightly colored gummy.
This need to make learning more palatable points to another uncomfortable truth about medical education today: much of it simply isn’t good. A lack of time, the relentless pressures of maintenance of certification, and the endless grind of required learning have transformed what should be a pillar of resilience in our profession into a source of resentment and burnout. Instead of fueling inspiration, learning has become a burden when in reality, it should remind us of the extraordinary power we hold to help our patients. That’s the insidious danger of current trends in medical education: they erode not just knowledge, but the very sense of purpose and meaning that should sustain us in our work.
Older colleagues often saw these innovations as “unserious” or lacking rigor. They leaned on their experience and the old standbys: the lecture and the journal article. But this, too, missed the mark. The complexity of today’s healthcare, the rise of team-based care, and the pervasive influence of human factors cannot be mastered by reading alone.
Current trends in medical education erode not just knowledge but also the very sense of purpose and meaning that should sustain us in our work.
Over time, I realized it was never really about the technology or the style but the quality of the teaching. Great educators make their delivery look effortless. But, like elite athletes or master artists, that ease is the product of thousands of hours of practice, reflection, and relentless iteration. The best teachers don’t just focus on what to teach; they obsess over how to help others learn. Like a great tennis coach, their true gift isn’t hitting the perfect cross-court backhand but helping someone else master it.
New Design Principles
But here’s the hard reality we face: master educators are rare. We cannot build a scalable system that relies solely on rare talent. What we can do is connect those extraordinary physicians with education innovation teams tasked with transforming their expertise into widely shareable, effective learning; designing delivery systems that amplify expert reach and convert individual brilliance into collective impact.
That realization reshaped how I thought about innovation in medical education. I came to understand that technology and novelty only matter when anchored in deeper design principles — principles grounded in how humans truly learn, grow, and change. The tools we choose should never distract or overwhelm; they should amplify those essential foundations.
Essential Design Principles for Medical Education:
- Cares about how we learn (not just what we learn)
- Leverages our strengths
- Anticipates our weaknesses
- Meets learners where they live
- Integrates seamlessly into our professional lives
- Is designed for the environment in which it’s deployed
- Encourages collaboration
- Seeks to inspire
We created a novel collaboration between artists, education designers, and topic experts to meet this challenge. Our goal was simple but ambitious: to make expert knowledge accessible to more people by moving beyond traditional methods and applying active, human-centered design. This perspective allowed me to reimagine medical education not as a battle between tools or trends, but as an intentionally crafted system that is open, adaptable, and always grounded in the human factors that make learning meaningful and lasting.
What emerged was a set of guiding principles that now shape every learning space I help design, and they sit at the very heart of The Protected Airway Collaborative. I call it Learning Built for Humans.
Learning Built for Humans means creating education that respects how people truly learn: it leverages their strengths, anticipates their challenges, fosters collaboration, and sparks growth, turning every training moment into an opportunity for lasting mastery.
At the time, I didn’t realize I was laying the groundwork for a design-forward approach to medical education. I was simply searching for a better way (a path that avoided the distractions of the shiny objects we so often chased) and fostered a healthier relationship with technology as a source of design inspiration, instead of admiration.
How the Protected Airway Collaborative Was Born
Then came the moment that crystallized everything. On a fall afternoon in 2019, walking through the Museum of Modern Art in New York, I was struck by how the space pulled people in. Beautiful artworks, immersive graphics, engaging typography, thoughtful lighting, informative audio, and all around me, people stood still, absorbed, reflective, engaged. No tests, no grades, no incentives. Just human beings immersed in learning and discovery.
It hit me: millions of people experience museums this way every year, but medical education had never seriously harnessed this kind of space. Even though we celebrate places like the Hall of Science for their educational power, we haven’t reimagined medical learning through this immersive, design-driven lens — one that merges digital and physical space, bridges art and science, and brings diverse teaching styles together under one roof for complex, theme-based learning.
I began envisioning a physical learning environment that seamlessly integrates hands-on equipment, fabricated models, and real-time digital feedback. Within this space, challenges, gamified puzzles, narrative storytelling, and simulation-based mastery learning all come together into a unified experience. The result is an immersive, asynchronous, sustainable, and scalable flipped classroom that bridges the digital and physical worlds and creates a cohesive, engaging learning system that works across the full spectrum of educational space.
When we first built it, we were filled with self-doubt. What were we doing? Would it even work? But it did. Across hundreds (and now thousands) of learners, we kept hearing the same feedback: the experience was engaging, confidence-building, and meaningful. Learners overwhelmingly preferred it to traditional lectures, and they found the integrated digital and hands-on resources to be a powerful improvement over the siloed education they were used to. Most importantly, they wanted more education delivered this way.
Part of the system’s success lies in its low-cost, scalable design, which leverages off-the-shelf tools and open-source principles. Pop-up learning spaces can run in repurposed hospital rooms, break rooms, or conference centers anywhere in the world, staying up for days or weeks and being accessible on demand without the limitations of traditional teaching models.
But the real key to its success isn’t any one style of learning we integrate — it’s that we integrate them. It’s not just about bringing in individual educators; it’s about bringing them together. The Protected Airway Collaborative is not just a learning style; it’s a way of delivering learning. And the culture it fosters has become an incubator for new ideas, new voices, and ever-expanding design horizons.
What’s Next
Looking ahead, the Collaborative continues to grow. We’re integrating augmented reality, collaborating with maker labs to produce low-cost models, experimenting with remote coaching, and welcoming an ever-expanding network of educators, artists, and technologists. What began as an airway management training project has evolved into a broader experiment in transforming how medical education is delivered — one built on intentional design, human-centered principles, and a commitment to meet learners where they are.
The Protected Airway Collaborative was born from a belief that better design leads to better care and that every innovation in the classroom or the training lab ultimately echoes at the bedside, where lives are saved or lost. That’s why this work continues: the true outcome of great medical education is not just smarter clinicians but safer, more compassionate patient care.
In my experience as a physician educator, the most important lesson I’ve learned is this: great medical education is never an accident. It’s the product of thoughtful design, relentless iteration, and a willingness to look beyond our own walls for inspiration. The Protected Airway Collaborative was born from that vision, and it continues to push forward because the collective work of building better learning systems, like the work of medicine itself, is never done.
For anyone unsure about launching their own vision to reshape how we learn in medicine, the future of medical education isn’t waiting for permission — it’s calling us to design it.
