Faculty Bibliography

INTRODUCTION: Esthetic considerations play an increasingly important role in patient care, and clinicians need a methodology that includes imaging techniques to capture the dynamic nature of the smile. Photographs of the posed smile are routinely used to guide diagnosis and treatment, but there is no standardized and validated method for recording the dynamic smile. The purposes of this study were to (1) determine whether a posed smile is reproducible, (2) compare visual and verbal cues in eliciting a smile, and (3) compare the diagnostic value of videography and photography in evaluating a patient's smile. METHODS: The smiles of 22 subjects were simultaneously photographed and videotaped on 2 separate occasions. For objective comparisons, measurements of the smile were obtained from 8 x 10 color still photographs and selected digitized video images. A panel consisting of a layperson, an oral surgeon, an orthodontist, and a prosthodontist subjectively assessed the reproducibility of the smile, posed vs spontaneous smiles, and the diagnostic value of video vs still images. RESULTS: Objective measurements showed that the posed smile can be reliably reproduced, whether captured by videography or still photography. However, subjectively, the panel members detected differences between the posed smiles taken on different days 80% of the time. The clinician panel members expressed a strong preference for videography over photography and for the spontaneous over the posed smiles. CONCLUSIONS: This study emphasizes the need to continue to investigate and standardize the methods of eliciting and recording a smile of diagnostic quality.

Patient-centered care involves an inseparable set of knowledge, abilities, and professional traits on the part of the health care provider. For practical reasons, health professions education is segmented into disciplines or domains like knowledge, technical skills, and critical thinking, and the culture of dental education is weighted toward knowledge and technical skills. Critical thinking, however, has become a growing presence in dental curricula. To guide student learning and assess performance in critical thinking, guidelines have been developed over the past several decades in the educational literature. Prominent among these guidelines are the following: engage the student in multiple situations/exercises reflecting critical thinking; for each exercise, emulate the intended activity for validity; gain agreement of faculty members across disciplines and curriculum years on the learning construct, application, and performance assessment protocol for reliability; and use the same instrument to guide learning and assess performance. The purposes of this article are 1) to offer a set of concepts from the education literature potentially helpful to guide program design or corroborate existing programs in dental education; 2) to offer an implementation model consolidating these concepts as a guide for program design and execution; 3) to cite specific examples of exercises and programs in critical thinking in the dental education literature analyzed against these concepts; and 4) to discuss opportunities and challenges in guiding student learning and assessing performance in critical thinking for dentistry.

Even if a clinician possesses basic knowledge in esthetic dentistry and clinical skills, many cases presenting in modern dental practices simply cannot be restored to both the clinician's and the patient's expectations without incorporating the perspectives and assistance of several dental disciplines. Besides listening carefully to chief complaints, clinicians must also be able to evaluate the patient's physical, biologic, and esthetic needs. This article demonstrates the use of a smile evaluation form designed at New York University that assists in developing esthetic treatment plans that might incorporate any and all dental specialties in a simple and organized fashion