Faculty Employees Celebrate Service Connecting with Students Faculty focus on improving teaching and learning When her third grade art teacher told Gwen Sherwood to draw a picture of the outdoors, Gwen tackled the assignment with enthusiasm. After all, she lived on a farm and had many opportunities to observe the outdoors. She was pleased with her drawing until she showed it to the teacher. Clouds are white, not blue, the teacher told her, and sent her back to redo the artwork.
Teachers have a profound influence on their students for good or for ill.
Helping teachers at UT-Houston make the influence positive was a goal of Advances in Teaching and Learning Day. The ways in which students learn was a focus of the keynote speech by Vimla Patel, Ph.D., professor of medicine and psychology at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. She is also a visiting professor in the Department of Health Informatics at UT-Houston s School of Allied Health Sciences. Learning during professional education is not just a matter of accumulating knowledge, but of learning to organize and evaluate information, she said. For example, a first-year medical student faced with a clinical case may be overwhelmed by massive amounts of information about the patient, she said.