On nurturing excellent teachers and students, paving the way for the next generation

Colleagues,

This is the fourth in a series of notes that elaborates on a 4×4 plan I first articulated, in fall 2024, as a strategic road map for the school. The idea behind these four notes has been to elaborate on four strategies for building an exceptional School of Public Health, outlined in that plan.

In February, I talked about Public Health Plus, our pursuit of interdisciplinarity. In March, I shared thoughts about our commitment to local and global impact. In April, I spoke about our commitment to building an outstanding community of faculty and staff, toward generating science and scholarship that create a better world. Today’s note is about the fourth arm of our strategy, achieving distinction in education through nurturing teachers and students. 

We are building a School of Public Health. WashU, through its Here and Next initiative, embarked on an extraordinarily ambitious project to launch an exceptional school, one that can lead the conversation on public health in coming decades. Building such a school will require excellence in science and scholarship, and building an ecosystem of such science and scholarship throughout the university. It is also, however, worth remembering that we are building a school. And at the heart of a school is teaching, preparing the next generation. Much as we want to achieve excellence in our science and scholarship, we want to achieve distinction in our educational programs to the end of having exceptional teachers nurturing students who will lead the world in the next generation. As with much vision-speak, that is easier said than done, and thinking about how we do that will require a careful understanding of the history of public health education and a healthy dose of looking ahead. 

I previously co-authored with colleagues a few papers that articulated where public health education has been and where it is headed, and in our edited volume, Teaching Public Health, Lisa Sullivan and I brought together a range of scholars and teachers who mapped out where the field may be headed. So, it is building on this work that I offer a few thoughts that I suggest may be most relevant to achieving distinction in education in the coming decade. 

Inquiry-based transdisciplinary learning; we will teach students how to think.

Public health contends with, and will contend with ever more, problems of enormous complexity. Take three recent epidemics: the COVID-19 epidemic, the obesity epidemic, and the drug-overdose epidemic. At face value, these affect different parts of the health spectrum, from infectious disease, to chronic disease, to behavioral disease. But these epidemics also have much in common. They affect millions of people, domestically and worldwide. They are also immensely complex. They all involve multiple causes. They are intertwined. And anyone who says there is an easy solution to any of them is not thinking hard enough. They call on us to think seriously about, and rethink, how we frame our engagement with creating the health of populations. These three epidemics are salient today. But they are also relatively new, at least on the scale of human time. We had never heard of COVID as recently as 2019; the obesity and overdose epidemics accelerated in the past two decades. And much as these epidemics are newly characterizing public health, we do not know what other issues will characterize public health in the coming decades. 

So, while I note above that planning teaching approaches for the coming decades means looking ahead, centrally it means teaching students about how to think when they look ahead. It means ensuring that our students learn the methods and approaches over specific subject-matter content. It means leaning into ways of learning and knowing so that they can be ready to deal with the health challenges of their time. And perhaps the only certitude we have about those health challenges is that they shall be complex, that tackling them shall require trans- and interdisciplinary approaches, and that the public health leaders of the future shall need to create whole new approaches than ones we can conceive of today. 

This all means that our education needs to lean heavily into teaching students methods, approaches, and frameworks of inquiry, and much less about the details of current content of today’s problems. That does not mean, of course, that we ignore the latter; students need to understand the foundations of current infectious, chronic, or behavioral disease. But they need to learn that as an exemplar of other, different challenges they shall face during their careers.

Skills-based and practical training; we will ground our teaching in the real world.

We are teaching students in a graduate school (even as we will engage more and more in undergraduate teaching through the Program in Public Health & Society). Recognizing that we are educating students for the real world so that they can work toward the aspirational goals of public health means, at core, making sure that our students are dexterous enough in the thinking and language of public health so as to help mold their approaches to the practice of public health as they evolve over their professional lives. 

That means that we want to make sure that our students are engaged with the mechanics of the profession early and often so that they can map their formal in-class education with the daily work of public health. It is one thing to understand a Theory of Justice , and quite another to wonder what this means for improving the health of someone born into subsidized, poor-quality housing, with a statistically near-negligible chance of changing their social circumstances in one generation. It is similarly one thing altogether to learn statistical methods that provide us confidence in our associations, and quite another to wonder whether we should be tackling well-established foundational causes of disease or behavioral factors that explain how the social environment gets under the skin. 

Experiential learning can, all too frequently, become passive exposure, observation of action that gives the illusion of formative experience. Exposure to the profession’s real-world engagement, however, coupled with an emphasis on principled thinking and an encouragement to forge integrative ideas at the interstices of disciplines, stands to elevate a learning experience into a unique opportunity to create an outstanding generation of public health professionals.

Dynamic and efficient training; we will meet the evolving needs of graduate students.

It is a somewhat boring truism to say that the world is changing. The world is always changing, and it is to the peril of anyone in any institution who does not recognize that. A more useful aphorism perhaps is that “better is always different,” meaning that we simply cannot improve over what we do in the moment unless we do things differently than how we do them in the moment. And that difference must rest not only in what we teach, articulated above, but also in how we teach.

Graduate school is expensive, both in material cost to the student, and also in time cost. It is our responsibility to deliver our training to our students as effectively as we can and as efficiently as we can. What does this mean? It means that we need to think carefully about credit hours, about how much we expect our students to be in the physical classroom, and about the most effective ways of using those classroom hours. None of this presupposes an approach; I am here simply raising the question. Because we are all human, it is difficult for us to imagine that learning can happen in a way that differs from how we learned ourselves. 

A rather obvious example of this has been in the shift in medical residency training that has, over the past two decades, undergone a substantial transformation in the number of hours that medical residents are expected to be engaged after evidence emerged that prior approaches were causing harm and that alternative, much more flexible approaches were just as good, and likely better, at training new physicians. We have not had such a reckoning in graduate public health training yet. But we should. This means that we will want to be open to new ways of teaching, both quantitatively and qualitatively, and lead the way into shaping graduate education of the future. 

Culture of teaching excellence; we will cultivate exceptional teachers.

And none of this is possible without distinction in teaching. To that end, we are building a school that, with existing and new partnerships, supports faculty through mentorship and with continuing education and professional development opportunities to build upon their teaching and to pave the path for new ways of thinking in the scholarship of teaching and learning. There is much that this embeds, including reimagining pathways for teacher professional development, approaches to evaluating teaching, and ways of engaging teachers together with scientists and scholars as full members of an academic community. I look forward to creating such a community together. 

I will end with a note about why we teach in public health. I previously have quoted Professor Al Sommer, who has in the past said that public health is an aspiration, or formally “a hope or ambition of achieving” better population health and narrower intergroup gaps in health. It is an aspiration insofar as we will never get to achieve this goal — i.e. the health of populations can always be better — and insofar as much of what we do rests on audacity of ambition that this is a goal worth working toward.  And our job is to align our education so that students can take on the mantle of getting closer to that goal than we have. This pushes us to make sure that we teach our students what Professor Leonard Glantz has called “principled thinking.” And that can be done by teaching students how to think, grounding our teaching in the real world, and doing so efficiently and as effectively as possible. If we can do that, we will be leading on public health education indeed. I look forward to mapping out how we shall do that through our curriculum together. 

A few notes in conclusion 

We now have an animated summary of our 4×4 plan, here and on our website. Do take a look when you have a moment. The idea behind this summary, as it has been with this series of notes, is to help focus our thoughts as we head into strategic thinking starting in the fall of 2025.

Also of note, the School of Public Health is undergoing an accreditation review by the Council on Education for Public Health (CEPH). Part of this process includes the provision of a third-party comment period, which allows anyone, including students, alumni, faculty, staff, community and practice partners, and members of the public, to share relevant information about the school directly with CEPH. If you have any information you would like to share with CEPH to inform their review, send your comments to submissions@ceph.org by Oct. 17. 

A reminder that later this month, coincident with the 78th session of the World Health Assembly, the School of Public Health will host a Washington University event in Geneva, Switzerland. We will host a panel discussion, “Listening to people to improve health systems: Post-COVID trends in public attitudes on healthcare,” in partnership with the Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research. The event will be Thursday, May 22 — 12-1:30 p.m. ET; 11 a.m.- 12:30 p.m. CT/St. Louis; 6-7:30 p.m. CEST/Geneva. If you are interested in attending in person, or in watching via livestream, please register here. 

On Thursday, May 1, Chancellor Andrew D. Martin announced With You: The WashU Campaign, a fundraising and engagement campaign that all can read more about here. The campaign aims to advance the university’s engagement in four key areas, one of which is public health. It is a privilege to be part of a university that has a clear vision of its future, despite — and maybe sharpened by — the fraught moment we live in. I look forward to engaging with the university on pushing this work forward in coming years.  

Lastly, a note on communication. These community notes shall pause in June, July and August, recognizing these are slower academic months, when all are recharging. They will resume in September. We will continue our Public Health in Progress weekly notes throughout the summer, though we may skip some weeks if there are no events to report or notes to communicate. A reminder that if you would like to receive these more regular updates, you can sign up for them here. 

Warmly,

Sandro

Sandro Galea, MD, DrPH
Margaret C. Ryan Dean of the School of Public Health
Eugene S. and Constance Kahn Distinguished Professor in Public Health
Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Initiatives
Washington University in St. Louis