If we are going to teach graduate students how to teach ...

It is increasingly being recognized that the teaching of physiology (actually all of the biomedical disciplines) in graduate and professional programs is being done by individuals with no formal training as teachers (6). While this is certainly not the only, or perhaps even not the major, cause of the current crisis in medical education, improvements in teaching physiology must ultimately come from physiology faculty who are better teachers. Van Liew (12) has described an interesting and valuable first step in the process of improving physiology teaching, a required course for graduate students in the Physiology Department at State University of New York at Buffalo, entitled Introduction to Teaching of Biological Sciences. The components of this course offer students a wide array of experiences that should help prepare fledgling instructors for their teaching tasks. Every physiology graduate program organizer ought to think seriously about requiring the students to take a course of this kind. However, if we are going to teach graduate students how to teach, we ought to be more ambitious than the Buffalo program seems to be; much is now known about the teaching/learning process and its evaluation, and this understanding should be incorporated into any program aimed at preparing teachers of physiology. While the learning process can not yet be characterized and described with the kind of rigor that we now apply to the study of physiological phenomena (7), it is clear that cognitive science and educational psychology have made tremendous strides in understanding what occurs as a student attempts to learn a scientific discipline such as physiology (10). Approaches to facilitating the basic learning process itself have been described (8), some of the factors involved in the learning of scientific concepts have been explored (4, 8, 9), and the issues involved in teaching thinking and problem solving have been studied (4, 11). Mastery of physiology is not easy for students, and as teachers we need to understand why it is difficult and, perhaps more to the point, how to make it less difficult. However, here, too, progress is rapidly occurring; the cognitive processes that are involved in teaching are similarly being investigated and increasingly understood (5) and the relationships between teacher behavior and student achievement are becoming better understood (1). Although much of the work in this area has focused on teaching in primary school, the principles that are being uncovered are clearly applicable to teaching at …