Now, I mean post COVID:
I prefer generating questions, by students, not by teachers. Also I never seek an answer; that is my teaching aims to reach no end in foreseeable sight. Hence we meet, we discuss, and we go away without too many answers. Then course ends and sometimes they graduate, but we never feel we have learned enough or anyone has taught anyone enough. My success depends on my failure to teach them while my ability to have them teach themselves and some of their peers. But note, we don’t make teams or groups or projects. Everyone is involved in everything and brings to the class an open mind, absorb and test it with prior knowledge. Those who have prior advanced knowledge, get to share and correct and those who don’t have a reasonable task to learn.
Before, I mean when I was following others:
I didn’t start this way. First 3 years I was very slide dependent; with one exception that I never used to explain the slides. Nowadays I don’t use slides at all. I believe in our field textbooks are quite poorly written. The internet has abundant introductory and advanced materials. The students and teachers may explore together, discuss and blend the relevant materials and prepare learning materials as part of the course. There are many in a class, so teacher may start a topic, let it get discussed and understood and then move on to a related but supposedly next topic. Based on students contribution in self learning, sharing and quality of peer teaching the grades are assigned. Knowing that most are able to engage, even the shy and the slow usually pick up the pace and leaves the course with adequate confidence and self-acquired plus peer-helped background. In my methods world, teacher is the catalyst and often a referee but not a coach, not a parent and usually not a traditional teacher.
Research based teaching, I mean, how can they be different (truly I am paid for my passion):
To show that students also can be paid for their passion for science, is my passion. Radiology is just a tool, but I have a magic bag of other tools that has different names like chemistry or math.
Radiology, out of nature and necessity, is the playground of dozens of science and technology developments. Our undergraduate research team (20-25 in total; 15 with stipend, 5-10 without) is an interdisciplinary team of current and graduated students from biology, chemistry, nursing and RAD TECH. This interdisciplinary group has re-learned many concepts that were presented to them before or has avoided completely due to complexity. Now, learning relevance, publishing manuscripts and seeing the value of something that no one has seen in the world before have created a research based education that they may proudly take away from 300 Jay Street.
Sample student assessments:
These are taken from various years and represent a fair outlook of student opinions about my teaching. I particularly pay attention to the extreme comments since those open my eyes and help me think differently. 4726 SET Fa18_Adv Img-I
SET RAD3737 2021 MR Lec First timehigh bar
SET Spr21_RAD4827 Adv CT Theory_Appl
Comment-RAD 3527 SET Fall 2022
SET RAD4829 Fa20 Adv MR Th Appl
SET RAD3737 2021 MR Lab Appl_first time high bar started
SET 3739 Spr23-MRI Clinical-Sarkar
Sample peer assessments (shown from 4000 level):
These were done by the department peers in several courses and the reports are essentialy available in OFSR files. I find the assessments to be very helpful and inspiring as they add meanings and reasons in addition to critical input to my teaching.
Peer Observation RAD 4829 Prof Sarkar Fall 2020
