Dental students are, in my opinion, quite brilliant and have to be in order to survive the academic rigors of dental school. So much information and so many classes are thrown at students in rapid fashion and in a very short amount of time to help keep the financial burden (which is absolutely ridiculous) and the amount of time spent in school to a reasonable level. And with so much information in so little time I find that students tend to compartmentalize (“box”) information as a means of academic survival.
Often there are dental school courses with disparate information that have no connections to anything and contain nothing relatable. These classes tend to be the ones we slog through the most and sometimes have to rely on shear determination and plain old memorization in order to survive. On the other hand, there are several classes that stream together marvelously and build upon each other. For instance, the general dental sciences courses, which I help teach, are the very skills that students will use for the rest of their dental careers. We start very basic and then we add more and more elements that connect from one general dental sciences class to the next, from one semester to the next, and from one year to the next with the ultimate goal of graduating a practitioner that is empowered to safely, skillfully, and compassionately care for their fellow humans.
However, (in my opinion) disparate courses with no apparent connections to anything hijack student’s abilities to make necessary connections from one class to another and knowledge retention/connection and ultimately implementation becomes disrupted. So often students are forced to jam information into their minds, take a test, then push that information to the recesses of their minds in order to make room for more information. And switching gears between these different classes can be difficult especially when there may be extreme stress and a lack of proper sleep, nutrition, and physical fitness.
Disparate courses are a necessary part of the dental curriculum however those disparate courses can create some frustrations for we faculty. We faculty know exactly what’s been taught in each of our classes and we faculty expect that each student will be able to retain and use what’s been taught in each of our classes. And as we know that the students were physically present in each of our classes, frustration arises when we come to the realization that information given minutes earlier can not be recalled, accessed, and used properly by the students. In essence, we faculty can lose sight of the fact that students have way more going on than what meets the eye. Even though we faculty are ultra focused on the importance of that which we’re teaching at that moment students are having to prioritize twenty different items which are ALL high priorities to each faculty they’ve encountered within a 48 hour time span (hmm, which of my twenty #1 priorities is truly #1?). Ya think that might cause a little brain pain?
We faculty, as dentists, have to constantly be aware that we have dental information connections that differ from our students. We faculty have been exposed to dental information for a greater period of time compared to our students. And as practicing dentists we have necessarily been forced to creatively combine information from many sources in order to better accomplish tasks necessary to treat our patients. This naturally gives we faculty/dentists a much deeper and richer and more connected/integrated knowledge base. Unfortunately our students (out of sheer necessity for academic survival) look at each individual class they take as a “box” with information that goes into and stays in each individual box. As stated previously, I believe this to be necessary for academic survival. And, yes, we faculty were dental students once upon a time and have necessarily been through the exact same things our students currently experience.
So, there is hope for our students. And we faculty have to be cognizant of the struggles that we went through as students so that we can recognize and be sensitive to our student’s struggles with burdensome amounts of information that may be overwhelming their abilities to integrate, connect, and properly use knowledge. Therefore I feel that it’s important for me to explicitly connect information and concepts for my students. Daily my students may have extenuating circumstances that disrupt their ability to recall information much less connect it and/or use it properly in their simulated and real clinical experiences without deliberate prompting from me. Through daily huddles prior to simulated and real clinical experiences I can deliberately bring prior knowledge to the fore thereby helping students to recall concepts previously discussed. What’s more is I can then take that prior knowledge and connect it to the day’s new information thereby creating a richer and more creative experience for the students so that they have more tools at their disposal and a constant reminder that we are truly building knowledge upon knowledge. This way creative pathways can continually be created and strengthened between new information and old information.
I hope this posting was helpful. Please let me know whether or not you hated it. Maybe you might have even liked it? 😊
Doc's Writing Refuge 