Individualized Consulting to Improve Teaching

Many of the readers of this volume are educational consultants or teachers whose primary interest lies in action. The first thing we want to know is how a method works and what it can do for us. Moreover, most of us are aware that methods are usually developed by trial and error and then justified within a set of assumptions about teaching and about human nature. Yet we often write about our methods of improving teaching as though they were logically derived from basic principles or suggested by a review of the literature. I will resist this tendency by relating the story first and discussing the underlying assumptions in the last few pages

Metaphors Underlying the Improvement of Teaching and Learning

Metaphors structure our understanding of the process of teaching and learning and thereby influence our efforts—both research and practice—to improve this process. Moreover, there is evidence of a shift in dominance from one metaphor to another which will have profound implications for the emerging field concerned with the improvement of teaching and learning

Genetics in Jeopardy: The Diagnosis and Treatment of Chronic Disease in an Undergraduate Medical Course-A Case Report

Presenting Symptoms Case History Diagnosis Plan of Treatment Initial Response to Treatment Relapse Emergency Treatment Final Assessment Conclusion

Implications of the Nature of Expertise for Teaching and Faculty Development

Over the last two decades cognitive theorists have learned that the development of expertise goes beyond the accumulation of knowledge and skills: expertise includes the development of pattern recognition and learned procedures that enable practitioners to deal with problems effortlessly or intuitively. Even more recently, theorists are distinguishing experts from experienced non-experts by how they use the bonus time and energy gained from solving problems intuitively. Experts invest it in tackling problems that increase their expertise rather than reduce problems to previously learned routines. Some implications of these different views of expertise for teaching and faculty development are discussed