There has been a paradigm shift in the teaching strategies fromdidactic or teacher-centered to more vibrant student centeredapproaches. For the last five decades, small group teaching(SGT) has been a hallmark of this reorientation of educationalstrategies especially in medical schools, which use problem-basedlearning as a core educational tool. The key strength of ...

The American Physiological Society (APS) Teaching Section annually honors an educator through its Claude Bernard Distinguished Lecture at the Experimental Biology meeting. Since I knew about my selection for almost a year, I had a long time to think about what I wanted to say and how I wanted to say it. The theme of my presentation was "nothing in education makes sense except in the light of st...

We tested the effectiveness of Faculty Institutes for Reforming Science Teaching IV (FIRST), a professional development program for postdoctoral scholars, by conducting a study of program alumni. Faculty professional development programs are critical components of efforts to improve teaching and learning in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) disciplines, but reliable e...

One of the teaching methods available to teachers in the ‘andragogic’ model of teaching is the method of ‘Socratic Seminars’. This is a teacher-directed form of instruction in which questions are used as the sole method of teaching, placing students in the position of having to recognise the limits of their knowledge, and hopefully, motivating them to learn. This paper aims at initiating the di...

There exists empirical evidence proving that students who are given the freedom to explore areas based on their personal interests, and who are accompanied in their learning by a supportive, understanding facilitator, not only achieve superior academic results but also develop socially and grow personally. However, pure Student-Centered Teaching is more demanding in terms of communication, orga...