Margaret A. Waterman

Effect of methionine on growth and protein composition of cultured soybean cotyledons

Abstract lmmature soybean cotyledons were cultured in vitro on a ‘complete’ medium with and without supplementation with methionine. The supplement increased dry wt by 23 %. The growth increase indicated that under these conditions the cotyledons could not synthesize methionine rapidly enough to supply the methionine required for maximum protein synthesis. This indication was supported by finding that aminoacylation of methionyl-transfer RNA was increased 18 % by methionine supplementation. Supplemental methionine also increased the methionine content of the protein fraction by more than 20 %, decreased the arginine content by 11 % and significantly affected several other amino acids. These latter results indicate that the amino acid composition of seed protein can be influenced by the supply of amino acids.

The teaching matrix: a tool for organizing teaching and promoting professional growth.

Despite barriers of limited time and lack of formal preparation for teaching, physician-teachers want to do a good job in the classroom. However, without appropriate feedback or self-reflection, physician-teachers have no systematic way to think about their role both in what students learn and in how well they understand important information. With this in mind, the authors developed a model, the Teaching Matrix, designed to encourage clinician-teachers to reflect on their teaching before, during, and after each teaching session. The Matrix helps teachers to address five central questions: Who am I teaching? What am I teaching? How will I teach it? How will I know if the students “got it”? And how will I improve my teaching for the next time? In this paper, the authors describe how the Teaching Matrix may be used as a tool for planning actions, as a “suggestion box” of ideas, advice, and questions, and, most importantly, as a guide to systematic reflection on teaching.

An Integrated Preclerkship Curriculum in Neuroscience, Psychiatry, and Neurology

The study’s objective was to promote understanding of the integration of preclerkship learning in neuroscience, psychiatry, and neurology and to share the authors’ experience with such a program. A dualism, which may have survived in the past for lack of robust evidence of mind-brain relationships, is now increasingly outmoded. Medical school education should reflect the increasing coherence to be found in these fields. The authors describe curricular and course innovations and revisions at Harvard Medical School that have been implemented in successive iterations over the past decade. These changes have depended upon multidisciplinary leadership, planning, and faculty participation, as well as faculty development and closer coordination between classroom- and hospital-based activity. A hybrid, problem-based block course in the second year integrates basic science with neurologic and psychiatric topics that are aligned with practice of relevant clinical skills. The authors have achieved a high level of integration and coordination of these subjects at preclerkship levels in the domains of both knowledge and skills. The students, as well as the faculty, strongly endorse an intellectually coherent and clinically relevant program of integrated preclerkship learning in neuroscience, psychiatry, and neurology.

Actions and Opportunities

This paper provides an overview of North American efforts to address social and sustainable development in undergraduate biology and teacher education. Progress has been uneven as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) rather than national policy are primarily responsible for infusing sustainability education into all levels of learning. Higher education addresses education for sustainable development (ESD) in several patterns: offering academic programs with sustainability emphases, using ESD as a co-curricular theme, greening of campus and curriculum, creating new courses on sustainability itself, and injecting ESD units or modules into individual courses. U.S. teacher education programs lag in the introduction of ESD topics due to decentralized control over education, existence of few official standards for ESD, and optional national accreditation of teacher education programs (they are state accredited). Changes in pedagogy are needed to facilitate integration of ESD.