Frank's Teaching Philosophy

Effective Teaching:

Requires a lot of time;
Demands that you care;
Assumes you respect the student;
Expects you to fully understand the material;
Should give you much in return for your effort;
Obligates you to advance the principles of scholarship;
Stipulates that if you make mistakes you will admit them to the class;
Says that if you do not know the answer, you'll search it out and tell them next time.

In writing a "statement" about my teaching philosophy, about why I enjoy this responsibility, why I sacrifice personal and professional obligations to prepare a lecture for another course, I find myself searching for the most appropriate answer.  The easiest answer is that I enjoy conveying knowledge to students, whether they are undergraduate biology majors, graduate students in pathology, or 1st and 2nd year medical students.  I am willing to put the time into learning the material, mastering what needs to be presented at the appropriate level and pace (hopefully).  I am also committed to give students the necessary time to come visit and talk about their courses, about their career aspirations, to give them advice about these options, and to support their scholarly endeavors.  However, to be more specific,

I feel there are 5 components to being a good, effective and successful teacher:

Caring about the students;
Commitment to preparation and organization;
Knowledge and love of the material;
Showmanship and clarity of the message;
Passion and enthusiasm.

First, I believe that you must care about the students to be an effective teacher.  Trust the notion that they want to learn, and they will reciprocate with a sustained effort.  Second, you must make the time commitment necessary to prepare for a lecture; this is not a seminar where you can just throw some slides in a carousel and talk.  A lecture is focused and organized.  Third, knowledge and love of the material is essential.  If the student senses your devotion to the topic it will be greatly embraced.  Fourth, showmanship and clarity are vital to getting your point across.  Whether its telling stories, doing show-and-tell, whatever the forum used, you must be able to clearly communicate and having some "showman" in you helps. Finally, passion and enthusiasm rule.  Without passion and enthusiasm for the work, the material presented wilts and the message in not delivered.

Without this desire to teach, the class instantly senses a lack of enthusiasm; the effectiveness of the message is not evident and is lost, the story not fulfilled.  I have read absolutely nothing about what it takes to be an effective teacher.  The concepts that I have listed I noticed in my "favorite" professors as an undergraduate and graduate student.  I have personally found that teaching is both the easiest and hardest task in my professional life.  Why?  To endorse the above 5 standards/components is not trivial.  This becomes especially difficult at times with grant proposal writing deadlines (and the financial obligations of biomedical research), laboratory personnel requiring attention, and the ever-increasing time burden of administrative and other university-medical school committees and duties.

The rewards of teaching are numerous, and I will describe only a few.  It is wonderful to see a face brighten with joy when knowledge and understanding penetrates a mind.  It is amazing how quickly sadness can permeate a room when you recite a story about a terrible disease and then to sense the immediate longing to know more, to search out the cause and effect a cure.  There is usually a connection with students that is a direct result from effective lecturing; they know when you are trying hard and when you are trying to convey knowledge.  When you do your best, you know it, because the reward is usually a comment or note from a student that simply says, "Super lecture, keep up the good work!"  Sir William Olser once remarked that “The hardest conviction to get into the mind of a beginner is that the education upon which he is engaged is not a college course, not a medical course, but a life course, for which the work of a few years under teachers is but a preparation.”

An acronym that I use for "TEACHER" is Time (and Commitment), Enthusiasm, Availability, Care, Honesty, Education (by example and knowledge), Respect.

Why teach?
Why make it such a high professional priority at a major biomedical research center?
Why teach undergraduates, graduate and medical students all in the same year?

Alice Palmer (past-President of Wellesley College) described it in this way: "It is people that count - you put yourself in people, they touch other people; these, others still, and so you go on working forever."  In addition to this wonderful comment, the answer for me is quite simply that I teach because of the students and because of my desire to provide scholarship!

(Taken from my "Teaching Portfolio" for The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, School of Medicine, 1997-2007)