Critical Components for Success

Congratulations! Together, we have completed the first step in planning our future.

We have identified some key critical components that will help the school reach its goal of moving from good to great. These are: scholarship, social responsiveness and leadership.

There is more to our profession than simply a collection of skills and procedures learned at a dental and dental hygiene school.

As you may have read in the newsletter, I started with introducing the concept of scholarship and what it means for us.

What differentiates universities from community colleges and trade schools is scholarship.

Some of you may recall that the U of A tried to discontinue offering dental education in 1994. Although the planned closure may have been financially motivated, the primary justification was inadequate scholarship. We have definitely made advances in this area, but we are still relatively weak in relation to other academic units within the U of A.

When you think of scholarship, you probably think of traditional research, which is often measured by things like external funding (amount and source), number of peer reviewed publications in prestigious journals, number of citations, number of PhD students supervised, number of prize winning faculty, number of patents, and number of invited lectures at international scientific meetings. These are all important, but we need to broaden our collective concept of scholarship. A broader definition of scholarship may include, but is not limited to:

• Generating new knowledge
• Putting new discoveries into context
• Showing practical application of discovery to practical problems
• Sharing discovery with students and the external community

The core of scholarship is application of the "Scientific Approach" which includes the following five steps:

• Problem identification (hypothesis)
• Methodology documentation (so others can repeat and verify)
• Document outcome (data gathering and analysis)
• Peer review
• Dissemination

This scientific approach can be applied to most of our work including teaching and clinical care. Our challenge is to discipline ourselves to view all of our activities through the scholarship lens.

How good are we? Not just in terms of comparing ourselves to other academic units or other institutions, but in terms of making a distinctive impact on the communities we serve.

Human nature predicts that we achieve what we measure. Perhaps it is time to think of additional new measures for our scholarship such as; degree of student involvement in scholarly activities, degree of inclusion of scholarship in our curriculum, our use of scholarship to strengthen inter-disciplinary and inter-departmental ties, influence of our scholarship on practitioners, and influence of our scholarship on health policy.

Over the course of the next three months we will discuss and explore each of the critical components that will enable our success.

We are more than just dentistry; we are scholars!