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The Faculty Chronicles (TFC) podcast, sponsored by the Touro Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL), is about building community, connection, and conversation. It will bring to life the stories behind the great works of Touro faculty, across disciplines in all our schools, focusing on classroom innovation in teaching and learning, science, business, medicine, education, wellness and more.
00:00:01:05 - 00:00:37:24
Speaker 1
Hello and welcome to The Faculty Chronicles, TFC, a podcast sponsored by the Turow Center on Excellence in Teaching and Learning and the Office of the Provost. Your TFC podcast hosts Army Professor Gina Bardwell and Dr. Elizabeth Enni. Across academic disciplines, Touro faculty are producing great work, and the Faculty Chronicles wants you to hear all about it. TFC Podcasts will highlight faculty chatting about their favorite project in research, teaching, learning, science, medicine, technology and so much more.
00:00:38:01 - 00:00:54:16
Speaker 1
So let's get busy building community connection and continuous conversation to provide our next faculty chronicle. Guest is on deck waiting to chat.
00:00:54:18 - 00:01:24:20
Speaker 2
Hello, everyone. Welcome to a new episode of the Faculty Chronicles sponsored by the Toro Center of Excellence in Teaching and Learning. I'm Elizabeth Uni, co-host of this podcast from the Tara College of Pharmacy in New York. Today we have Dr. Eric Walkes from the Tara College of Dental Medicine with us as a guest. Dr. Vox is the director of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery and the Director of Ethics and Professionalism at the College of Dental Medicine.
00:01:24:22 - 00:01:27:17
Speaker 2
Dr. Wachs, welcome to this podcast.
00:01:27:19 - 00:01:29:07
Speaker 3
Thanks for having me.
00:01:29:09 - 00:01:37:06
Speaker 2
Eric, tell us a little bit about your journey at Total, when and where you started and where are you now?
00:01:37:08 - 00:02:00:02
Speaker 3
Day I think what I need to start by saying is that my, my journey at TKM toward dental school is really very much intertwined with TKM itself because I don't know who's listening. But for those of you who have it, don't know our history. TK The M is a very new school. We've been open seven years all together, so we started in 2015.
00:02:00:04 - 00:02:21:01
Speaker 3
I'm a board certified oral surgeon. I was in private practice and teaching part time before I came here and like I said, I started in 2015. We didn't have students, we didn't have a clinic. We barely had faculty. Maybe there were a dozen of us, if that many and I was invited by Jay Goldsmith, who was our founding dean.
00:02:21:07 - 00:02:40:08
Speaker 3
Jay is also an oral surgeon, and I worked with him through one of the residency programs that I taught at and where he taught. And we got to know each other and he invited me to come here when the school was opening. My role was to teach and provide oral surgery services to our patients and teach our students all about oral surgery.
00:02:40:13 - 00:03:03:10
Speaker 3
We had to start by designing a curriculum, and I needed to decide how I wanted to teach and approach oral surgery for our students, what background they needed. And it's not just teaching a knowledge base, but it's also teaching hand skills that they need to learn from us. And I was also going to be running the oral surgery, the didactic and the clinical portion of our program.
00:03:03:16 - 00:03:27:21
Speaker 3
So really I needed to do both. So we started with a curriculum and also we were involved in planning the health care facility because unlike many of the other Cerullo schools, not only are we a school, but we're a self-contained health care clinic, for instance, New York Medical College, which we're affiliated with, they teach their students, but when they're students do their clinical experience, they rotate out to other institutions, to other hospitals.
00:03:27:23 - 00:03:46:22
Speaker 3
We have some rotations. Our students go on. But the primary teaching of their clinical skills is done in our health care facility right here in our building. The other important thing we needed to do when we first started was the school needed to be accredited and we needed to do things to comply with COTA, which is the Commission on Dental Accreditation.
00:03:46:22 - 00:04:07:22
Speaker 3
We needed to get accreditation from them to be an accredited dental school, so we needed to work on that. So we'll jump ahead. It worked. We got full accreditation. There were several steps along the way from provisional and but we needed to prove things along the way that we were doing what we said we would do. We've graduated several classes so far with over 100 students each.
00:04:07:24 - 00:04:32:04
Speaker 3
I think we're being successful because our class size is now doubling. We're expanding our student base. We do well with our students being accepted into postgraduate programs. Those are educational programs, residencies and other types of programs and our students getting jobs. We now have the New York Medical College Oral and Maxillofacial surgery to residents rotate through us a couple of days a week.
00:04:32:04 - 00:04:58:11
Speaker 3
So again, we're doing a lot of that way and we just started our first Orthodontic postgraduate program. So as I said, my journey here was intertwined with that of the school itself. I currently teach didactic and clinical work with the students. Besides oral surgery, as you mentioned, I direct the ethics and Professionalism curriculum and work with that. I teach in several of the courses pain, anxiety, pharmacology, microbiology, clinical dentistry.
00:04:58:11 - 00:05:31:00
Speaker 3
We teach medical emergencies and how to deal with them. Stuff that will happen in students future dental offices. I sit on several committees. I've shared some. I work with continuing education, quality assurance policies, academic integrity. I advise students we do counseling, career and residency wise, and I am the advisor for CPA, which is a student, professionalism and education and ethics association, and that's a subset of an honorary dental society that is across the nation or across the world.
00:05:31:02 - 00:05:57:06
Speaker 3
So that's what I do here. That's been my journey here. And as you mentioned, I teach the ethics and professional curriculum, which became an add on. It wasn't what I was originally hired to do when we were setting up for our accreditation, as I spoke about earlier. We set out our curriculum and one of the things was we are going to teach ethics early on and I'll talk a little bit about that later.
00:05:57:08 - 00:06:01:14
Speaker 3
And I stepped up to fill that role. So that's my journey here.
00:06:01:16 - 00:06:27:20
Speaker 2
Wow. Great, Eric. First of all, congratulations to the College of Medicine for growing so fast in such a short span of time. Starting a post. Graduate programs. That's great. And congratulations to you, too, for taking on a whole new role and just going from there. Awesome job on that. As you rightly said, teaching ethics and professionalism, especially to the incoming students.
00:06:27:22 - 00:06:48:09
Speaker 2
Tell us a little more about and why are we teaching the students ethics, especially as soon as they are walking into the school? Because most of the time students are to this school to learn about industry. They learn about physiology, to learn about the mouth and all those kind of things. And here, as soon as they are walking in, you're teaching them ethics.
00:06:48:11 - 00:06:55:23
Speaker 2
Tell us a little more about it as to why this needs to be taught to the Denver students and also at the beginning of their career.
00:06:56:00 - 00:07:16:07
Speaker 3
So when I was in dental school and when I was a resident and I spent the four years as a resident, we didn't have ethics courses that wasn't touched on in the curriculum. If you happened to touch upon it, it was just something came up and you had a discussion maybe with other students, other residents, faculty members, whatever, but there was no formal course.
00:07:16:09 - 00:07:37:10
Speaker 3
It wasn't really thought about those days. And over time it's changed, obviously. When we started out here, as I said, we were developing the curriculum and we knew that ethics and professionalism at this stage needed to be a part of the curriculum. And many times it's taught later on in dental school. We decided to teach it right when they get here.
00:07:37:10 - 00:07:56:10
Speaker 3
So it's a summer course. Our students start in July, so it's in the summer course. It's their very first semester here. And the first lecture, the first session of it we touch upon at an orientation and the first formal part of the course is given the first week. We wanted the students to know that it was important to us.
00:07:56:12 - 00:08:22:20
Speaker 3
It should be important to them. It's not an afterthought. It's not like third or fourth year. We're going to sit there and say, by the way, you should be ethical and make sure you do it this way. So from the start, we wanted them to know that it was very important to us. My view on ethics and teaching ethics to professional students is our students are 22 years old, many older than that, but they start at that range.
00:08:22:22 - 00:08:45:22
Speaker 3
I don't think it's my job and I don't think I could make a student ethical when they get here. Either they are or they aren't. That was their parents job, I think, and society's job and whatever religious institution they went to, whatever other social institutions they went to, and pretty much their level of how ethical they are has been determined before we get here.
00:08:45:24 - 00:09:12:10
Speaker 3
So I can't make them ethical. But go back to your question. Why teach ethics when they're doing dentistry? When there are health care providers on a broader scale, they're going to encounter situations that they haven't encountered before and they need to know how to look at those situations from an ethical and professional standpoint. And so we can teach them the different things involved in those situations that they might not have thought of without just doing that.
00:09:12:12 - 00:09:32:01
Speaker 3
They need to approach when they're going to analyze the situation and make a decision that they're not familiar with, they need to approach that situation and have the tools they need to make, We hope, the right decision. They need to understand the context of making these decisions is, like I said, a dentist or again, broader a health care provider.
00:09:32:03 - 00:09:56:03
Speaker 3
They're going to see unfamiliar situations and they need to understand the implications of how they react to them. And how they react with their staff, with their patients, with their colleagues. An easy decision is between something right and wrong when you're making an ethical decision. Unfortunately, most of the time, or fortunately most of the time, the decision is not that straightforward or not that simple.
00:09:56:09 - 00:10:29:10
Speaker 3
There might be several, right? Several right answers that may have subtle but very important differences. And they need to learn how to analyze those situations and how they can make their decisions. And that's why we need to teach ethics. It's very easy to go from right and wrong. It's much harder to do the subtle differences and see that the American dental Association has a code of ethics and it basically, as they put it, it has high ethical standards, should be adopted and practiced by all providers.
00:10:29:10 - 00:11:01:22
Speaker 3
But they especially make the statement that high ethical standards should be adopted and practiced throughout the dental school, educational process and subsequent professional career. So day one, they need to adhere to this code, our dental students, and we need to make sure they do that. When you look at ethics, if you want to talk about someone being ethical, if you just want to list some adjectives that and these I took right out of the American Dental Association code honesty, compassion and kindness, integrity, fairness and charity.
00:11:01:24 - 00:11:20:15
Speaker 3
And if you look at the principles that students need to learn on a broader scale, they would be autonomy, beneficence, non maleficent's, justice and veracity. That's the background we teach our students. Those are the concepts and principles they need to consider when they're making the decision. That's why we teach ethics and that's how we teach.
00:11:20:15 - 00:11:45:24
Speaker 2
USC's Wow. As you said, ethics is not something, it's an audit after. It shouldn't be an afterthought. It should be talk to them from the beginning. But it's also a tough topic to teach, actually, right? Because it's like you can teach them as much theory as you want, but eventually they have to face it and they have to learn how to make a decision when they're facing the situation.
00:11:46:01 - 00:12:09:23
Speaker 2
I don't think lecturing might be the best way to do it, and I'm sure you're doing other ways to teach it. So can you tell us how do you teach this in the classroom so that it is it's attracted to students and they feel like they're getting something out of it and they're learning? I think in the beginning you said it's not only knowledge, but it also the hands on skill rights and ethics is one I big where they had of the skill.
00:12:10:00 - 00:12:14:10
Speaker 2
So how do you teach ethics so that the students actually develop that skill?
00:12:14:12 - 00:12:52:24
Speaker 3
I'll agree with you 100%. You can't just stand there and lecture one. People aren't going to listen and two people aren't going to learn how to do it. The ethics that we cover is at several different points in the curriculum, but at several different levels. As I mentioned, we have an introductory ethics course that starts day one or week one of the curriculum over the summer and is broken down to a number of lectures because we do, they do need to learn some basics and the lectures that we are currently using in that course includes several topics as an introduction to ethics and the principles that I just mentioned.
00:12:53:01 - 00:13:25:20
Speaker 3
They're taught the principles, what they mean. They looked at some of the analysis. After that, we get into specifically the American Dental Association Code of Ethics and Professionalism, which I just spoke about, and it has several different sections in it. It defines the terms of ethics that we were talking about the principles. It gives specific examples of how they should be interpreted and again, in the context of being a dentist where some of the ethics fit in as far as advertising, patient autonomy, lots of different areas.
00:13:26:01 - 00:13:48:01
Speaker 3
I'll probably talk about those a little bit more as we get through this. But so we talk about that. We talk about other codes, Hippocratic Oath, obviously we do some different topics. We talk about health disparities and equity just because that's something important to us, but to us as an institution. And we want that to be important to our students.
00:13:48:03 - 00:14:09:01
Speaker 3
We talk about substance abuse in that course for members of the public and including substance abuse by health care providers, which can become a problem at times. We talk about jurisprudence, the difference between ethics and the law, and one of the concepts we talk about often ethical standards are higher than legal standards, but they need to know how all that balances.
00:14:09:01 - 00:14:30:17
Speaker 3
So a lot of that there are the introductory lectures where they have to learn the basics, but we know that it's not going to enable them to make ethical decisions. It's not to give them all the tools we need. We talk about our approach to ethical decision making and we go over how they can look at different specific situations or specific cases, and we do a lot of case discussions.
00:14:30:17 - 00:14:51:13
Speaker 3
So during the lectures, we'll discuss specific cases themselves and how you come to a decision. And then we try to make that pretty interactive, even though it's a large group of students together and we try to make them think, obviously. Then we split up. We do sessions with small group discussions where we have a number of different dental providers.
00:14:51:13 - 00:15:16:24
Speaker 3
Are hygienists help out with this, but they meet in small groups and we discuss specific cases and what they would do often will get to get their gut reaction and then we get into it further, using our approach to ethical decision making. So they look at those cases in detail. The cases we use come from various organizations. For instance, I mentioned Spear, the student professionalism, the Ethics Association.
00:15:17:04 - 00:15:37:16
Speaker 3
They have a number of cases at their website that we use, asked the American College of Dentistry, which is an ethical honorary dental society. I use stuff from the American Medical Association, which often fits in because we don't restricted to just dentistry itself, that we, as I said, they're health care providers and they need to consider all that.
00:15:37:18 - 00:15:56:16
Speaker 3
And there are a number of cases that I've taken where other faculty members have come to me and said, I had this happen in my office and I want to discuss it with you. Cases that I've developed myself from my experience in practice, and I'd teach them before. So we use those courses. We I'm sorry to use those cases in the introductory course.
00:15:56:18 - 00:16:15:00
Speaker 3
The next course we give is during the students do or their second year, and that's an end to professional course. So as I mentioned, we sit on the same campus. For those of you who don't know with New York Medical College and we're affiliated with them, we do a course with our two students and the first year the M one medical students together.
00:16:15:02 - 00:16:37:23
Speaker 3
And again, that is totally case based. So we look at different cases. They're smaller groups and the students have to discuss those cases and come up with their approach, how they respond to that. And we make sure that the groups have medical and dental students. You go into a classroom and have them sit in the dental students sit together, the medical students sit together, and then we move them around because we want them to interact with each other.
00:16:38:03 - 00:16:58:02
Speaker 3
That's the point of the being interprofessional course. And not only it's important for them to get each other's perspective, but when they're out in practice, they will be dealing with other health care providers, physicians, pharmacists, physical therapists, lots of different areas, and they need to learn how to interact and how to have these discussions and come up with the answers.
00:16:58:02 - 00:17:17:07
Speaker 3
And again, that's a case based course. And then a lot of stuff we do is integrated into the clinical care, The D three and D for the third and fourth years are clinical care, and different patients come in with different issues and we often have discussions about that as the cases come up, and that's the rest of the curriculum there.
00:17:17:12 - 00:17:42:07
Speaker 3
We're trying to innovate and add to the curriculum currently discussing Katie Yu Moola runs the Clinical Skills and Simulation Center over at the medical school. It's a phenomenal facility. For those of you who don't know it, they have patient mannequins, which can simulate many medical conditions. We use the center for it to teach the students how to deal with medical emergencies that I've been speaking with Katie about developing.
00:17:42:07 - 00:18:04:09
Speaker 3
They also have standardized patients. They have actors who are trained to work as patients. So we've worked with them, but we're talking about setting up something where we matched the clinical students during the clinical years. We match the medical and dental students and we use different situations that you'll encounter that our students will encounter where they have to interact with these.
00:18:04:11 - 00:18:27:19
Speaker 3
For instance, there might be recommendations regarding a specific medical condition for pre medication for a patient, and the physician and the dentist may not agree. Very commonly. It happens in clinical practice and they need to get on the phone and talk to each other and come up with the right answer. So we're looking at doing simulations for that from both a clinical and an ethical standpoint.
00:18:27:21 - 00:18:42:16
Speaker 3
Additionally, for other programs, as I mentioned, our student organization, we bring in guest speakers and hit on different topics related to ethics. We've done something on microaggressions. We've had numerous guest speakers covering different topics.
00:18:42:18 - 00:19:04:02
Speaker 2
That is a blog that you all are covering in the ethics. What a beautiful way of using the simulations and case studies to bring it up and again, letting the dental students learning with the medical student. And so it also shows as an event on the campus that these are some of the topics that we can work together with other campuses.
00:19:04:04 - 00:19:28:00
Speaker 2
You talked a lot about the different kinds of cases that you might be picking from the speaker or from AMA or any of these places. For our listeners who may not be from the Denver background or maybe not even from the medical background, do you mind giving one example or two examples of ethics cases that has been used to teach students how to make these ethical decisions?
00:19:28:02 - 00:19:49:14
Speaker 3
Certainly I'd be happy to do that. One of my favorite cases that we discuss actually isn't even dental related because our students started off as students. They were students before they got here. They're still students during the first two years. They're not seeing patients yet. They are learning clinical skills in the lab, which they'll take to their patients care.
00:19:49:16 - 00:20:10:06
Speaker 3
But to start, they are students. So one of the first things I like to cover with them is the ethics of being a student, even though they've spent, I don't know how many years, what, 16 years being a student before they got here. One of the cases that we like to use, which we commonly used, that was a case where we have two students who didn't go to class.
00:20:10:06 - 00:20:33:13
Speaker 3
They're undergrad students, two roommates. They didn't show up at class most of the time, didn't really pay attention. They were having a good time as freshmen students, and they found out the day before an exam that the exam was the next day. They didn't even realize because of their lack of attendance and paying attention, that the exam was there and they realized that they were not going to be able to do well on the exam.
00:20:33:15 - 00:20:52:11
Speaker 3
So they borrowed notes from a friend of theirs and there was a lot of material there and they didn't know how they were going to try to learn the material. So one of them got some Adderall from a friend of theirs, and they took the Adderall so they could stay up all night and study. And they figured that so they'd get through the exam.
00:20:52:13 - 00:21:09:24
Speaker 3
The other one just made a good old fashioned cheat sheet. They wrote down a bunch of answers on their hand, their wrist, whatever, on a piece of paper, and they snuck that into the exam. And the two of them had a discussion before the exam about cheating and what they should do. And then we talked to the students.
00:21:10:04 - 00:21:34:12
Speaker 3
Did they both cheat? Was taking the Adderall cheating? What's the risk and benefit of that? Did the person with the class a cheat, cheat, cheat? And everybody always agrees that the person with the cheat sheet that a lot of the students in various, but they don't necessarily feel that the person with the Adderall cheated because they did have to still study and they stayed up all night to study and to learn some of the material.
00:21:34:14 - 00:21:58:16
Speaker 3
So I'm not going to tell you the answer. But, you know, we do have a whole discussion based on that. And then we also get into whether or not Adderall really helps. Do you mean, you know, will you retain the material with that? But is there a difference? And then even with sometimes we have discussion where they might agree that both of them cheated, but are there degrees of cheating?
00:21:58:16 - 00:22:19:11
Speaker 3
Did they cheat differently? Should they have the same penalty for both of them? And then we point out to them, which they're not aware of, that taking a prescription, it's a prescription drug. Using someone else's prescription is actually illegal, too. So once they realized that this was illegal again, was it cheating? Was it not cheating or they learned the material.
00:22:19:11 - 00:22:48:00
Speaker 3
So that's one of the first cases we cover, which actually generates a lot of discussion. So then we do a number of other cases. We might have a case that we talk about often where we have a recent dental school graduate and our students, many of them come out with significant loans, as do all students, and they're working to someone and the person they're working for wants them to do more extensive work on patients than they feel is indicated it might be.
00:22:48:00 - 00:23:08:09
Speaker 3
Instead of doing just small what you know is a filming or restoration, they want them to do a crown, which is a bigger procedure. It may help to do in certain situations. If there's a lot of damage, it's something that's 100% necessary. But these might be judgment calls or these might be excessive. And this is the only job the student has.
00:23:08:09 - 00:23:35:23
Speaker 3
They have student loans, which they're paying back immediately, and they're getting pressure on them to do something which they may not feel is right. So how do they respond to that situation and what do they do? Then We get into other cases where we might have a there's a case we do where an undocumented. Well, there's a patient who comes in and the front desk suspects that it's an undocumented patient and wants to turn them in and thinks they might have someone else's insurance card.
00:23:36:00 - 00:24:01:11
Speaker 3
And are you allowed to do that? And again, we talk about some legal issues related to that, but mostly the ethical issues and what should be done about that, if anything, should be done. What's the dentist obligation? What's the staff's obligation? We do a case on a 16 year old girl who comes in and she's pregnant. She tells the oral surgeon she's about to get her wisdom teeth out with some sedation he can't sedate or because she's pregnant.
00:24:01:11 - 00:24:17:10
Speaker 3
She says it's okay because I'm having a termination or pregnancy next week. And he says he's not going to do it until she does. Maybe it's to change her mind. So we can't do the procedure today. And she is you have to do it because my mother's in the waiting room waiting for me. She can't find out that I'm pregnant.
00:24:17:16 - 00:24:26:16
Speaker 3
So we discuss all the implications of that regarding patient autonomy, legal issues, those are just a smattering of some of the cases that I like to cover.
00:24:26:18 - 00:24:45:01
Speaker 2
Wow. That is a lot of things that is happening. And you know, these students have to face it one day as a dentist and have to make a decision. So it's really good to hear that all these things are being covered. Going back to our listeners, many of our listeners may not be from the health care. So I'm just wondering, that's a question to you.
00:24:45:03 - 00:24:54:03
Speaker 2
Should we teach ethics to all college students whether they are in health care or not? And what are your thoughts on that?
00:24:54:05 - 00:25:11:12
Speaker 3
But I think when I start the class, I often ask how many people took an ethics class before and a smattering of them do. But if you look at like for the first case I talked about, you know, the two students who cheated or didn't cheat, how have you interpret that? I think all students would benefit from that.
00:25:11:12 - 00:25:30:23
Speaker 3
And I wouldn't start in college. I would start in high school or earlier. And there are different ways to approach it. But I do think it's important. And if they have that background, it's going to help them when they come in. But again, at the beginning we spoke about can we teach them to be ethical or can we just teach them how to analyze the situations and why it's important to teach it?
00:25:31:00 - 00:25:50:20
Speaker 3
And if you look at the cases that I mentioned, they are situations they wouldn't necessarily have encountered beforehand, and that's what I said. They need to know how to. And most of those weren't specifically dental related of the cases that I just mentioned. I think one of them was. But they need to learn how to analyze those situations that they have faced before.
00:25:50:22 - 00:25:54:04
Speaker 3
And that's why I think it's important at every level.
00:25:54:06 - 00:26:14:08
Speaker 2
I completely agree with you that students need to be taught ethics at every level. Now that we're talking about ethics and students, I wonder, is ethics needed for faculty and should they be trained on ethics? What are some of the kind of ethics that faculty should be having and should be trained on any talks of that?
00:26:14:11 - 00:26:35:17
Speaker 3
That I think it's important at every level and I think for several reasons. Before we go further, I think it's very important for faculty, but we're certainly not saying that faculty are innately unethical or any different than everybody else. But what really happens in this course, I mentioned that case. We talked about, again, going back to the Adderall.
00:26:35:19 - 00:26:56:00
Speaker 3
And so we started off by talking that lecture about the ethics of being a student. And then for me, when I develop that lecture, which I gave, it was a natural progression. So first I talked about the ethics of being a student, and then next I talked about being the ethics of being a dental student. They had experience being students, and that situation is something they might have certainly seen in college.
00:26:56:00 - 00:27:25:02
Speaker 3
If not them, then, you know, people they know. But then in dental school there are different things you have to do. There's a lot of lab work you do. There are practical exams of things you have to do. You know, you practice restorations on models first and so they need to learn how to deal with all that. Might be that they're worried that some of the materials they need we're going to run out of if a student starts hoarding materials because they want to save it for them to practice and another student ends up without it, they have a bunch their ethics in that.
00:27:25:02 - 00:27:43:15
Speaker 3
So we talk about the ethics of being a student, the ethics of being a dental student, specifically. And then we went into we gave different examples related to that, such as the one we just did from there. To me, it was important for the students to realize that it doesn't end there and there are certain ethical standards they have to adhere to.
00:27:43:21 - 00:28:06:02
Speaker 3
But we wanted that. I wanted them to know that faculty are also ethical standards they have to adhere to. There are two reasons I wanted the students to know that. One was that they needed to understand that faculty were in the same position as they were, but they needed to understand how the faculty ethics might affect them. So faculty are also health care providers.
00:28:06:02 - 00:28:28:21
Speaker 3
All our faculty are dentists or hygienists, so we need to be ethical. As far as the provision of health care, which is what we spoke about. But also as an educator, you're wearing a different hat and they needed to understand that faculty had certain ethical obligation to do as their educators. For instance, I said that we do many lab exercises with the students and they're greater on that.
00:28:28:23 - 00:28:51:22
Speaker 3
But often, you know, it's looking at a small preparation of a tooth. Obviously, there's some subjectivity when you're doing that. We teach them. Yes, you might think that grading is subjective, but we have rubrics the faculty has to follow. We do faculty training and calibration, so all the faculty are approaching things the same way. The grades should be somewhat similar because of the rubrics.
00:28:52:03 - 00:29:13:17
Speaker 3
If someone fails an exercise in lab, then we have a standard where another faculty member needs to review it and make sure they concur with that. And if they don't, then it goes to the course director. So there are many ethical things we do to help the students or to treat the students fairly, and I wanted them to understand that.
00:29:13:19 - 00:29:38:11
Speaker 2
Well, that's beautiful. I think that kind of brings us to close off our podcast. So at the time today, I really tag for this wonderful conversation we had about ethics, teaching students ethics as a student or whatever profession they are in, and also ethics for faculty. And the significance for students and faculty should know that we are all on the same page on being ethical.
00:29:38:13 - 00:29:40:24
Speaker 2
Thank you so much for this great talk today.
00:29:41:01 - 00:29:47:01
Speaker 3
Thank you for having me. I very much enjoyed our discussion and thank you to your listeners for being here with us.
00:29:47:07 - 00:29:57:21
Speaker 2
Thank you so much, Eric. Once again, thank you to all the listeners and signing off Elizabeth, on your podcast host. And in the next episode.
00:29:57:23 - 00:30:29:16
Speaker 1
Thank you for tuning in to the Faculty Chronicles TFC Terrell's podcast featuring the projects and work of faculty throughout the Touro College and University system. TMC is sponsored by the Office of the Provost and Kettl, the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning. We hope you like what you heard and will keep listening, so join us next time on The Faculty Chronicles as we highlight and share faculty achievements that build community connection and continuous conversation.