The Touro College of Dental Medicine in Hawthorne, N.Y., is approaching dental education from a unique angle to keep up with the rapid evolution of dental technology.
Touro is one of few dental schools prioritizing the continuing education of its faculty in order to make sure they’re prepared to teach students the latest information they’ll need to practice. Naren Rajan, DMD, the assistant director of digital dentistry at the Touro College of Dental Medicine, is leading efforts to upskill faculty by teaching them about new technologies.
The dental school now requires its professors to take digital dentistry classes, allowing them to teach students new clinical methods in addition to traditional methods. This also allows these dentists to incorporate new clinical practices into their own patient care.
Dr. Rajan told Becker’s that it has become more important than ever to ensure faculty members are trained in the latest digital dentistry techniques to keep up with industry standards.
“There is a seismic shift that is happening in dental education with respect to faculty members,” Dr. Rajan said. “How can you teach students new techniques when the faculty didn’t learn them on their own? Every school is going to have this bottleneck in adopting new technologies and evolving, so this program started organically out of that need.”
One of the challenges when launching this program was working in an adequate amount of time to properly train faculty with the school’s already full curriculum. The school moved from lunchtime workshops to hosting longer sessions in a dedicated learning space where faculty learn about a range technologies, including intraoral scanning and CAD/CAM dentistry.
“Students are students, whether they’re faculty members with 30 years of experience, or they’re students who have never seen it,” Dr. Rajan said. “We start them from scratch. We don’t make any assumptions, so I do treat a faculty member really the same as a dental student in many ways because I think when you assume, you’re actually doing them a disservice because they may need to understand something in a basic way, and I give them the opportunity to be a student again.”
The dental school plans on expanding its program to include additional modules and potentially bringing in other faculty members to teach their colleagues techniques within their own expertise.
Dr. Rajan said programs such as the one at Touro could lead to quicker adoption of technologies at dental practices. Additionally, more schools could soon launch similar initiatives as the importance of technology implementation grows.
“If any institution is going to be progressive and forward thinking and constantly evolving, then the faculty need to be progressive and forward thinking and constantly evolving,” he said. “Offering these kinds of programs to faculty and not making it optional, making it mandatory — you’re going to develop your faculty in a different way, and they are going to grow as clinicians, even though they’ve had 20 or 30 or 40 years of experience. I’ve seen people get excited about things they’ve done for decades, and now it’s refreshed. It’s renewed. If you can find a way to connect with and excite faculty members, you’re going to connect with and excite the students as well.
