Fundamentals of Teaching in the Basic Sciences

Abstract

Graduate students in the School of Medicine have had an elective course on how to teach offered either annually or every other year since 2007. The initial course design was based on suggestions from other educator colleagues (especially Dr. Dee Silverthorn). The course is offered in 90 minute to 2 hour time blocks once a week throughout a 15‐week semester. The course is discussion‐based with online reading material provided through the course management system and various assignments during the course (mostly involving having each student design aspects of a hypothetical course that they may teach in their future careers). Topics for the discussions include: the three‐legged stool, importance of learning objectives, planning a course, designing a course, learning preferences, teaching styles, visual aids and active learning, assessing student learning, exams and grading, evaluating a course, teaching portfolios and other resources. The professors provide feedback for specific assignments during the course which include: a minute paper on a course that the student liked and why, how to choose a textbook, writing learning objectives, writing a syllabus, writing a report on a class observation, writing a short review paper on an evidence‐based teaching pedagogy, writing 5 active learning ideas for their course, a short videotaped teaching session (as a preliminary to the final microteach session), finding 3 different online resources for their course, and a peer and self‐evaluated 10‐minute videotaped microteach session that acts as the final examination for the course. The short review paper was added recently when this course became a required course for the non‐thesis option master’s program in basic biomedical sciences so that the students would have experience with scientific writing. The culminating videotaped microteach session was felt to be so valuable for the students that a short videotaped session was added earlier so that students could make improvements after their initial attempt. An interesting recent complication in the course is that although the course was initially designed for preparing future faculty, now the majority of the students in the course are pre‐professional students hoping for acceptance into health professional programs where classroom teaching may not be a high priority. Thus, the emphases of the discussions and assignments have changed to address relevance to these students. However, student evaluations following the two classes with predominantly master’s students have still shown appreciation of the discussions and assignments for future health practitioners.Support or Funding InformationDr. Goodman was partially supported by an Institutional Development Award (IDeA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under grant number P20GM103443.