Dr. Theodora Grauer

Today’s health care environment is becoming more and more chaotic as people strive to control rising costs while maintaining high quality patient services. The burgeoning uses of complex technology add new levels of sophistication to diagnosis and treatment and increase the pressure on practitioners and faculty to remain up-to-date. Meanwhile patients crave individual attention and compassionate practitioners in an environment of critical workforce shortages in all areas of health care. Dedicated faculty continually strive to maintain professional and program accreditation, up-to-date curriculum and successful teaching outcomes while remaining responsive to workplace needs and new student demographics. Additionally, promoting teaching excellence has always been, and will continue to be, of the utmost importance. To this end, a school-wide committee was formed to explore ways of addressing the faculty’s common teaching concerns and it was decided to begin by holding a series of “teaching conversations.”

Why the sudden interest in promoting excellence in teaching? Can we not assume that there has always been excellent teaching happening in every classroom? We know that our faculty is superbly prepared to teach subject matter but, as Susan Greenstein, founder of the C.W. Post Teaching-Learning Center and former English professor wrote in a Teaching and Learning Initiative report, “good teaching is rooted in more than scholarship and discipline-specific knowledge. Teaching is an art that develops over time and during all phases of a teaching life and there is benefit from a rich, collegial exchange of ideas about the pleasures and dilemmas of teaching and about how to teach effectively.” Faculty often see themselves as rugged individualists who have not traditionally engaged in the “give and take” about “how we do it” that occurs in other fields. Given the complexities of today’s health care milieu and the increasing demands on our students it follows that the best teaching includes more than a traditional lecture. It requires an active, reciprocal exchange that promotes the thinking abilities necessary to respond to the complex world we live in.

Our first “teaching conversation” took place in January and was a great success (see article, p. 3 “Using Case Studies to Facilitate Learning”). Faculty met and shared ideas about the use of an innovative teaching strategy designed to enhance students’ critical thinking skills in assessing complex data. The case study method demands a focus on the moment, thus promoting faculty/student engagement and the excitement of discovery. A second teaching conversation occurred in April 2003 (see article, p. 3 “Understanding HIPAA – Creative Strategies to Facilitate Learning). I look forward to future teaching conversations in the School of Health Professions and Nursing.

Dr. Theodora Grauer