CDM Professor Wins Provost's Teaching and Learning Award

Carol Kunzel, PhD, professor of Foundational Sciences in Dental Medicine and Sociomedical Sciences at CUMC has received an Innovative Course Design award from Columbia’s Office of Teaching, Learning, and Innovation. The award, which supports the redesign of existing courses or the design of new courses to improve teaching and learning using innovative learning strategies, is a part of a competitive grant program meant to encourage faculty to innovate and experiment with projects that focus on inclusive pedagogy, collaborative peer learning and mentoring, and teaching with AI. 

The award provides extensive support from the Center for Teaching and Learning, with assistance in redesigning courses in order to “increase teaching effectiveness and student engagement through the creative use of new pedagogical strategies and/or digital tools and the use of technologies to create evergreen resources for foundational courses.” In addition, Drs. James Fine, Dr. Aubrie Sein, Dr. Shubha Dathatri, and Mr. Michael Waring of the College of Dental Medicine and the Vagelos College of Physician and Surgeons join Dr. Kunzel as collaborators on the award.
Kunzel’s project focuses on enhancing Postgraduate Research Methodology and Biostatistics, a course she has directed for 15 years, focused on cultivating research skills foundational to academic dentistry, that is a required course for first-year residents and postdoctoral students at the College of Dental Medicine. 
Kunzel says that there is a need to integrate AI technology into CDM’s core curriculum as a tool of teaching and learning with intention and purpose. Her goal for the award is to address the limitations of online learning, using innovative methods to incorporate tools that encourage active student engagement and induce critical thinking. She says that she hopes ultimately to develop and implement a strategy blending usage of AI tools and lectures and student-led discussions to strengthen the learning approach.  These strategies, she says, can enhance postdoctoral students' development of research proposals, and their ability to critique the ideas and approaches emerging in the literature more broadly. 
Using the resources that are provided by the grant, Kunzel says that she hopes to develop and implement teaching and learning strategies that are less lecture-focused and more active learning-focused. She says that she hopes not only to enhance the Postgraduate Research Methodology course that is the focus of the award, but also to use the redesigned course as a model for other courses in the core curriculum. 
“My hope is that, using new technologies, we can strengthen the research foundation upon which trainees can build bridges to careers in academic dentistry,” Kunzel says.