Anesthesiologists must have a comprehensive understanding of many pathologies, technical pitfalls, and, most importantly, rarely seen but rapidly life threatening crisis situations. It is of little practical value to demonstrate knowledge immediately after learning about rare crises, as it is likely to be months, or even years, before that knowledge is required in clinical practice. Unfortunately, retaining skills and knowledge after being trained in uncommonly seen events is known to be problematic. Both staff anesthesiologists and residents have been found not to adhere to established guidelines during crisis management. In this issue of the Journal, Goldhaber-Fiebert et al. report on their investigation into the learning and retention of information following a 30-min lecture regarding seven rare but important medical errors. These investigators established objectives based on their departmental quality assurance database and adverse events reported by faculty, and they should be commended for incorporating the information into a formal residency curriculum in an effort to prevent future occurrences of critical incidents. The process of discussing reported critical incidents is valuable; furthermore, Goldhaber-Fiebert et al. seized the opportunity to use these crises and ‘‘near-misses’’ for a broader educational advantage. Goldhaber-Fiebert et al. should also be congratulated for their attempts to measure the success of their lecture program. Instead of limiting themselves to the learners’ subjective impressions of the teaching, they have examined its impact. Following testing with multiple-choice questions (MCQs) immediately after the lecture, they noted a 22.2% increase in the learners’ knowledge of the material, compared to their assessment of the learners’ knowledge of the same material prior to the lecture. In particular, their focus on retention of knowledge at 6 months is especially important. When the learners were retested at 6 months, their improvement from baseline fell to 7.9% compared to the control questions that were unrelated to the teaching intervention. To be precise, every other anesthesiologist at the lecture was simply answering one more of the seven questions correctly. Considering the clinical importance of the information presented in the lecture, we consider the next question to be: What could be done better? In most institutions, lectures remain the most commonly used teaching modality in a formal medical education curriculum. As lectures appear to be in no immediate danger of extinction, it is essential that they be delivered effectively. There is the potential for effective and ineffective learning in all teaching methods. Important elements of good lecturing include clarifying the concepts, allowing students to be active learners, and demonstrating the processes of solving clinical problems. These elements are consistent with cognitive psychology research that demonstrates the importance of deep processing of information for its long-term retention. Varying the stimulus being delivered during a lecture is also important, as learning starts to decline almost immediately after lecturing begins. A detailed review of this subject is found M. D. Bould, MB (&) Department of Anesthesia, The Hospital for Sick Children, University of Toronto, 555 University Avenue, Toronto, ON, Canada M5G 1X8 e-mail: dylan.bould@utoronto.ca