UTDB Students Honor Dosch with Freeman Award for Non-Clinical Teaching

UTDB students chose Robert O. "Rod" Dosch, D.D.S., as the winner of the John H. Freeman Award for Outstanding Non-Clinical Teaching. Dosch is an associate professor in the Department of Restorative Dentistry and Biomaterials.

For a teacher, there's no better award than one voted on by the students themselves, says this year's winner of the John H. Freeman Award for Outstanding Non-Clinical Teaching, Associate Professor Robert O. "Rod" Dosch, D.D.S., of the Department of Restorative Dentistry and Biomaterials at The University of Texas Dental Branch at Houston. First- and second year dental students choose the winner.

Dosch is a Houston native and 1971 graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. He chose dentistry as a profession because it would let him use his head and hands. "I'm a gadget guy and love to make things, and that's what attracted me to dentistry," he said.

He earned his dental degree at the UT Dental Branch, then practiced for 14 years before joining the faculty in 1992, where colleagues William Tate, D.D.S., Jay Ferguson, D.D.S, and Kenneth Porter, D.D.S., "taught me how to teach," he said. Dosch is now a Freeman Award veteran, having won the honor several times. He teaches dental anatomy to both DDS and dental hygiene students, and teaches esthetics and operative dentistry to dental students.

As meaningful work, teaching is hard to beat, Dosch said. "I've learned how to perform many procedures much better by teaching them than I did by doing them every day in practice, because you're trying to teach every detail about it so someone else can understand, and that's hard to do."

While he believes he got an excellent dental education in the 1970s, Dosch says teaching today is no longer based on the old standard, "See one, do one, teach one."

"There's a quotation: ‘Tell me and I forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand,'" he said. "That's the way I teach. If I can get them involved, they want to learn. If I say, what do you think? Or how would you do it? I think they learn better."

By Rhonda Moran, Dental Branch

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