In order to fulfill our mission we have developed an educational philosophy that we most frequently describe as “learner-centered.”
We believe in the autonomy of the student to learn, to grow, and to change. We believe education serves the fundamental purpose of providing learners access to information, tools, and experts. In turn learners then contribute the same to their communities. We believe our principal duty to the student is to encourage and facilitate acquisition of factual knowledge, progression toward higher levels of thinking and reasoning, and to engender in them the core values of the physician assistant profession. We fulfill this duty by teaching concepts and skills, by modeling behaviors, and by assessing students according to the profession’s standards and core values.
We pursue these objectives through a curriculum that progressively builds the students’ fund of knowledge and skills while continuously evaluating the students’ abilities to assimilate and use that knowledge and skill in clinically relevant ways. A basic fund of medical knowledge forms the foundation for students to become self-directed, life-long learners who are capable of solving unstructured, complex problems. We thread service-learning throughout our curriculum as a central means of achieving these objectives.
We see our students as adult learners and ourselves as a team of educators. As such, we employ a variety of teaching styles and assessment strategies. We believe that the needs of a given content area or learning situation should determine the approaches we use. We believe that the content should be delivered by faculty, outside experts, and the students themselves in both active and reflective forms. Furthermore, we believe that the measurement of learning, through assessment, should provide feedback to the student as well as to the faculty. Therefore, our assessment strategies take many forms, such as peer and self-assessments, objective tests, clinical skills assessments, and writing.
We believe in creating an atmosphere of collegiality among faculty, staff, and students that emulates the clinical team approaches which are essential to successful patient care. We recognize the individuality of students, each having preferences regarding styles of teaching and learning. We address variation in these preferences through the variety of approaches we employ and the encouragement of instructors to teach according to their own philosophies.
