Osler Award for Outstanding Teaching (Faculty of Medicine)

Ann Wechsler

Department of Physiology

1) The greatest challenge? Maintaining a suitable balance between the desire to convey to students the relevance and excitement of the latest information and the critical need to provide them with a firm foundation, usually based on older more established factual knowledge. Tension always exists in apportioning time to various teaching goals: stressing the importance of what is currently known, developing an appropriate historical perspective, promoting a sense of wonder and curiosity about that which is still to come and -- most of all -- getting them to THINK!

2) Providing students with up-to-date knowledge, delivered in a clear, logical, well-organized presentation, appropriate for their background and needs, goes without saying. Good teaching, however, goes beyond mere transmission of facts; it includes conveying one's own enthusiasm for the subject, stimulating the learners' imagination with the implications of the facts, challenging their analytical skills, and motivating independent thinking. Making the students aware that we enjoy our discipline and that we enjoy teaching them will generate the "winning conditions" for learning.