Teaching Interests and Strategies
I have taught introductory anatomy and physiology to new college students, and virtually all aspects of general pharmacology and pathophysiology at a nursing student level via both in-class lectures and distance education. I currently teach renal physiology to medical students and give a variety of pharmacology lectures to medical, pharmacy, dentistry and nursing students. I am always on the lookout for analogies drawn form everyday life that can be incorporated into my discussions of how the body works or drugs bring about the desired response. I also make Flash animations to help illustrate more difficult concepts that benefit from movement, such as the consequences of countercurrent capillary flow in the renal medulla or the means by which the kidney can excrete a dilute or concentrated urine.
When I am the sole instructor in a course, I assign regular homework because I believe this helps promote comprehension of the reading assignments. My preferred means of doing this is by making reasonably comprehensive web-based (but printable) crossword puzzles with Crossword Compiler, and giving each student a relatively unique version of the puzzle that is due before class. 
This eliminates simple copying while encouraging teamwork and some preliminary discussion of the concepts. By using PHP/mySQL to create dynamic web pages, I can monitor some aspects of student effort, such as time of random puzzle assignment, and automatically grade their work and record the time when they submit their answers. Students are also encouraged to make notecards from the crossword puzzle clues, to quiz themselves from both sides of the notecards, and to always sort into "know" and "don't know" piles in order to focus their time on things that they cannot remember. Undergraduate nursing students typically left my semester courses with ~1100 notecards on pathophysiology and ~1000 on pharmacology.
Another favorite teaching/learning strategy as sole instructor, often used along with crossword puzzles, is to have students write one multiple choice question per chapter with one correct answer that students who have studied should know, three incorrect answers that might sound plausible to students who have not studied, and explanations why the incorrect answers are wrong. Submitted questions are then given to the students for study purposes, with the understanding that some of them may appear on their exam. This has the additional benefit of helping students recognize testable elements while reading.
So, do these unorthodox sole-instructor teaching methods work? Yes, absolutely, based on standardized testing performance, end-of-semester student evaluations of me, and student satisfaction with what they had learned and accomplished long after they left my classroom. However, there are significant challenges along the way. First, there is always a vocal minority of students who grumble to administrators early in the semester about having to do homework and then forget to retract their complaints at the end of the semester. Secondly, my homework assignments have been blamed by faculty teaching other subjects when students performed less well on standardized tests in those areas. Lastly, many hours of time and effort are required to generate a database of crossword puzzle clues for each puzzle, followed by the time required to make multiple versions of the same puzzle (I generally made versions a-z).
If you have read all of this and remain interested in using crosswords for your teaching, contact me and I will give you more details.
GRANT SUPPORT
American Cancer Society. “Mechanisms of Regulator of G-protein Signaling 2 (RGS2) in Prostate Cancer” , P.I. Yaping Tu, (1/07-12/10)
Nebraska State LB595 Tobacco Settlement Funds. “P-Rex1 Promotes Prostate Cancer Metastasis”, P.I. Yaping Tu, (7/06-6/09)
National Institute of General Medical Sciences. "Short Course: Integrative and Organ Systems Pharmacology", P.I. David Bylund, (5/05-4/08, + given a 1 year extension after site visit)
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Search PubMed for "Wolff DW "
