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Neurobiologist Diane O'Dowd began using interactive teaching in small classes at UC Irvine five years ago. However, she was unsure how to incorporate active learning in a new introductory course she was developing—Bio 93, a four-section monster that would serve 1,600 incoming freshman. Thinking about her own children, one of whom will be a college freshman this fall, she decided it was important to try. "Do I want him trained in a large traditional lecture class that many students don't even attend and the ones that do come are often sleeping? The answer is no," said O'Dowd." So she participated in a teaching workshop sponsored by another HHMI professor, Jo Handelsman, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the summer of 2004. There she was inspired by demonstrations of active learning in large classrooms. She was particularly struck by a video clip of a class taught by Dianne Ebert-May at Michigan State University. "There were kids on the edge of their seats in a huge auditorium, talking to each other about biology," she recalled. "That's what I wanted. It's no fun teaching to empty seats and snoring." When she returned from the Wisconsin workshop, she and a team of three assistant professors, Jorge Busciglio, Karina Cramer, and Rahul Warrior, developed and taught Bio 93 in the fall quarter of 2004. They formed small in-class work groups, employed clickers-handheld devices that give students immediate feedback on questions posed in class-and did class demonstrations. O'Dowd even roped her teenage daughter and son into helping her build a huge model of a cell, using toy balls that turn inside-out to represent exocytosis and surfboard rack foam to explain changes in protein conformation. Appreciative student e-mails began to pour into O'Dowd's inbox. O'Dowd studies the neuron connections that account for learning and memory in fruit flies, and she regularly brings research into her classroom. For example, when discussing study strategies, she tells her students that the fruit flies she works on in her lab remember information in much the same way that humans do. The flies can be trained to avoid an odor by pairing it with unpleasant stimuli, like electric shock. More importantly, she explains that long-term retention of the association requires repeated exposure to the pairs of stimuli interspersed by intervals of rest. While the flies can learn quickly if they "cram"-receiving paired stimuli with no rest intervals-they, like their undergraduate counterparts, soon forget what they learned. "I love teaching, but I want to do it in the context of my research," she explained. "Students love it when you tell them about recent discoveries. That's one bonus they get by attending a research university. The challenge is creating an environment where faculty are rewarded and enabled to excel in both research and teaching," O'Dowd went on to say. As an HHMI professor, O'Dowd intends to help young scientists find ways to juggle research and teaching successfully. Using the introductory biology course as a model, she will work to promote team development and teaching of large core classes, to improve the quality of instruction for students while reducing faculty time away from their labs. In addition, she plans to coach graduate students in an interactive style of teaching and to teach postdoctoral fellows to mentor undergraduate researchers in productive ways.
Dr. O'Dowd is also Professor of Developmental and Cell Biology and Professor of Anatomy and Neurobiology at the University of California, Irvine.
RESEARCH ABSTRACT SUMMARY:
Using Drosophila and mouse models, Diane O'Dowd studies the activity of living neurons from the brain. She uses molecular genetic approaches to explore the communication between neural cells. Her HHMI project aims to bridge the gap between research and teaching in the biomedical sciences at research universities through teaching, training, and mentoring.
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Photo: John Hayes/AP © HHMI
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