We are sad to announce that Harold Modell, one of the founders of the APS Teaching Section, passed away on Saturday, April 8, 2023, at his home in Seattle. Younger members of the Section may not remember Harold because his attendance at meetings recently had been limited by failing health, but for more than 30 years Harold was an active and vocal member of the APS teaching community.  Harold was the founding editor-in-chief for Advances in Physiology Education, and the Teaching Section honored his contributions to the Society by selecting him to be the 2004 Claude Bernard Distinguished Le ..read more

Who is the G.O.A.T.? Figure 1 shows the main life events that took place since the G.O.A.T. was born. Lionel Andres Messi Cuccittini (Leo) was born on the 24th of June 1987, in the city of Rosario, Santa Fé province, Argentina. In 1992, when he was 4 years old, his grandmother suggested that he should play for local club “Abanderado Grandoli”. Even at that young age, his agility and soccer skills were quickly noticed, and he signed into the historic professional soccer team in Rosario, called Newell’s Old Boys, in the youth ranks in 1995. Newell’s Old Boys is notorious for being one of the few ..read more

I feel smart learners are becoming surface learners in the integrated curriculum by juggling with only the learning outcomes included in the blueprint without processing the information. They calculate the bare minimum content required just to pass. They are not ready to come out of their comfort zone to progress by acquiring hard-core concepts at the level of application and synthesis. They appear in a module exam and stop relating it to other modules. Integrated curriculum is being implemented at the cost of lack of ownership by subject specialists. System-based modules lay the foundation of ..read more

One of the things that I love about Buena Vista University (BVU), the small, liberal-arts school that I teach at, is the ability to form deep, long-lasting connections with students. As our most recent NSSE data suggests, BVU forms meaningful student-faculty and student-academic advisor connections. For example, the ‘Quality of Interactions Engagement’ indicator revealed that 63 % of our first years and 78 % of our seniors had ‘very good’ or ‘excellent’ interactions with academic advisors and 73 % of our first years and 63 % of our seniors had ‘very good’ or ‘excellent’ interactions with facul ..read more

As you begin your semester, you should be thinking about how trust matters in your classroom, and how to build it. Trust in an academic setting may be defined as “a perception that the instructor understands the challenges facing students as they progress through the course, accepts students for who they are, and cares about the educational welfare of students” (1). While your own definition may differ slightly, it likely will contain a description of a classroom dynamic that most instructors will find worth pursuing. Is “trust” an important factor in learning outcomes in STEM classrooms? In a ..read more

One of the most common questions that I would hear while serving as the Teaching Section representative to the APS Committee on Committees (CoC) was, “How do I get more involved with The Society?” If you have wondered about that, the good news is that the application portal for APS Committee applications is now open. You have until 6 February to prepare and submit your materials. To help you prepare, the CoC has released a detailed rubric with information about how each application is evaluated. In this article, we’ll go through the 6 key criteria, as well as some tips and strategies for putti ..read more

I started writing this blog with the intention to talk about the undergraduate physiology course I revamped this semester. Don’t worry, I still plan to talk about it because it is a fantastic course. However, since this blog is set to be posted around December 31st, I thought I might start off by reflecting on my past year. If you learn anything from my journey, I hope it’s that even achieving small goals can lead to bigger changes than you might expect.   To begin this year, my goal was to attend Experimental Biology (EB). It was one of my favorite conferences to attend as a graduate stu ..read more

I love to read quotes by Greek philosophers. They were wise individuals and did not have access to immediate “knowledge” as we do today thanks to available technologies. After all, the internet would not be created for thousands of years later. What this did afford them the opportunity to do is to engage in what we call critical thinking. It is all they did! Today, their quotes help to keep me grounded; my favorites are the quotes attributed to Aristotle. Aristotle was a scientist, a biologist, an intellectual, and a philosopher, just like us! Yes, it is hard to consider ourselves “philosopher ..read more

Attending professional conferences is an excellent opportunity for students to network, learn, and gain a greater understanding of how science works. Undergraduate students often attend conferences because they are presenting their work; however, attendance at professional conferences even if not presenting can open a variety of opportunities for students (Gopalan et al., 2018). Potential benefits of participation include content knowledge or application gains, exposure to different ideas, better understanding of how different areas of a field integrate, networking building, career exploration ..read more

This blog tells a little bit of my personal history as an educator: from a typical boring lecturer to an extroverted educator who has tons of fun playing drama in the classroom with students. But first let me wonder: wouldn’t it be great if we teach, and our students learned well and far beyond the exams? What to do when students’ attendance is not required, like most medical schools, and regardless of the time we spend preparing the session only a few students attend it. Or when attendance is required, like in many undergraduate courses, students struggle and only learn enough to pass the exa ..read more