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Department of Biochemistry - School of Medicine

SUMMARY OF TEACHING IN BIOCHEMISTRY

  1. EVALUATION OF TEACHING.

    2. The Department of Biochemistry teaches courses to both Graduate Students and First Year Medical Students. In both of these settings, most courses are team taught. The course director attends all the lectures, evaluates the teaching faculty and offers some advice. It is suggested that in the future the course director provides more feed-back to the instructor, especially in ways that the presentation could be improved.

    Student Evaluations:

    Graduate Student evaluations are distributed and collected by the course director. The data is collated and analyzed by the course director and the summary is distributed to all the participating faculty. Each faculty member is evaluated and each sees their own evaluations. Medical Students administer their own evaluations, collate the data and give a "grade" to both the overall course and the faculty member, each in seven different areas. There is also space on the evaluation form for pointing out the professor's strengths and for making suggestions for improvement. The individual faculty member sees their own evaluations and the course director sees all evaluations. Once each year a student committee of three meets with the course director to discuss the student evaluations. On the whole, valid criticisms and suggestions are responded to.

  2. DEVELOPMENT OF TEACHING.

    3. Faculty

    Graduate Courses: In the "team taught" courses some criticism is given by the course director, but little mentoring. In one "seminar-type" course where many faculty are involved, the course director takes special care to explain the overall objectives and plan of the course to each faculty member and ensure that each faculty member meets several times with the specific students for whom they are responsible.

    Medical School Course: Junior faculty are encouraged to "sit in" on selected lectures in the course and the year before entering the course a "new" professor attends the lectures in the area they will be taking over. None of the junior faculty currently teach in this course.

    Graduate Students

    As we have no contact with undergraduates, our Graduate Students receive limited teaching experience. Graduate Teaching Assistants are responsible for portions of the Medical School Human Biochemistry course and they sit in on the lectures given by the faculty and tutor the Medical Students who are having difficulties. The Graduate Students also participate in a weekly "Journal Club" where groups of four students pick a research topic from the literature and work with a faculty member on the overall topic. Over five subsequent weeks, first the faculty member and then each of the students presents aspects of the topic in detailed one hour lectures to the whole Department. Each student is also assigned a Faculty "critic" who meets with the student after the presentation to offer constructive suggestions on delivery style. In the future each graduate student will be given a copy of the TRC teaching manual when they enter the Department.

  3. INCENTIVES FOR SUPERIOR TEACHING.

    4. Excellence in teaching has to be documented for promotion and tenure in the Medical School and evaluations by two senior faculty, who have attended lectures, have been included in the tenure package. In the future, the Course Directors will generate a written evaluation of each faculty teacher which will be discussed with the faculty member and placed in their file. The Dean annually gives as many as ten awards for teaching in courses for Medical Students. The nominations for these awards can be by a faculty member or student and the prize is a plaque and a $2,500 stipend for academic expenses.