Teaching and Learning Scholars Share Their Expertise with Pharmacy Faculty

As the College of Pharmacy works toward our Strategic Plan’s Teaching and Learning Goal of developing and implementing the new curricula for our programs, we’ve been thinking a lot about how we can prepare ourselves to “apply best practices in teaching and structure curricula to achieve optimal student learning outcomes.”As I’ve described in previous blog posts, we’ve been working on developing new courses and curricula in both our Bachelor of Science in Pharmaceutical Science and our Doctor of Pharmacy programs.At the same time, we’ve been talking about our teaching as well. We’ve discussed what we want to continue in our classrooms, and what we could change and improve.  We’ve spent time reading and discussing what works with our students as well as what doesn’t, and we’ve consulted with experts in the scholarship of teaching and learning, all to help our faculty stay up-to-date in pedagogical methods while staying up-to-date in their subject matter.To help our faculty continue to lead the way in pharmacy education, the college recently offered three teaching and learning professional development opportunities that I’d like to tell you a little more about.  In the past four months, three visiting scholars have come to Parks Hall to share their expertise in Team-Based Learning, assessment, and deepening student engagement and learning.

Last February, we hosted Dr. Doug Eder, an internationally-known scholar in higher education assessment and emeritus faculty at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (SIUE).  Dr. Eder presented a seminar about effective multiple choice exams, “Thinking Critically About Designing Multiple Choice Tests.” Dr. Eder led seminar participants through the construction of effective multiple choice exams, the properties of effective and ineffective questions, designing questions to evaluate critical thinking skills, and ways that student behaviors foil analysis.

KDA two-time recipient of the University Teaching Excellence award from SIUE, Dr. Eder taught courses in anatomy, physiology, neuroscience, bioethics and biology, and was named the Emerson Visiting Distinguished Scholar at Hamilton College.  He has served in administrative roles at Arizona State University, University of North Florida, and Purdue University, and is currently serving as the “Assessment Coach” at Indiana University Kokomo.  Additionally, Dr. Eder has served as an external evaluator for three US Title II educational development grants and two NSF research grants.  He is also a resource person for The IDEA Center of Manhattan, KS a nonprofit organization whose mission is to improve learning in higher education.

In March, Dr. Todd Zakrajsek, Executive Director of the Academy of Educators in the School of Medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill spent a day with our faculty, teaching assistants and residents, delivering three talks: “Teaching for Student Learning: Using Habits of Mind to Frame Teaching and Learning,” “Applications of Learning Theory to Support Effective Teaching: Concepts and Evidence,” and “Overcoming Apathy and Motivating Students in the Learning Process.”

A scholar of curriculum design, effective teaching and student learning, Dr.Zakrajsek has delivered keynote addresses and presented workshops in more than 30 states and four countries.  Additionally, he directs three national conferences on college and university teaching as well as an international teaching conference.  He sits on two educationally-related boards, and serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Excellence in College Teaching. He served as the inaugural director of the Center for Innovative Teaching at Central Michigan University and the founding director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Southern Oregon University.

And most recently, on April 30 and May 1, the College hosted Dr. Larry Michaelsen, David Ross Boyd Professor Emeritus at the University of Oklahoma, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Central Missouri.  A Carnegie Scholar, a Fulbright Senior Scholar and, former editor of the Journal of Management Education, Dr. Michaelsen has conducted workshops on teaching effectively with small groups in a wide variety of university and corporate settings.  He has received numerous college, university and national awards for his pioneering work in two areas: Team-Based Learning (TBL), a comprehensive small-group-based instructional process; and Integrative Business Experience (IBE), a program that links student learning to experience creating and operating actual start-up businesses used to fund hands-on community service projects.

Pharmacy faculty and colleagues from the Colleges of Nursing and Veterinary Medicine engaged in three TBL workshops with Dr. Michaelsen.  The first two workshops, “Designing Group Work that Really Works,” “Getting Beyond Covering Content: A Key to Preparing Students for Their Future Professions,” formed the foundation for an advanced workshop, “Turning Good Group Assignments into Great Ones,” where our teachers became students, actively designing and critiquing ideas for group assignments that they can adapt for their own classes next year.

Our faculty strive to be excellent teachers, but implementing innovative teaching and learning strategies in the classroom isn’t something that happens automatically. Factors like the changing healthcare environment, employers’ needs, students’ desire to apply what they learn in the classroom to real-world situations, as well as the importance of interprofessional collaboration all influence what we teach and how we teach.  Each of the visiting scholars contributed new ideas to our internal conversations about teaching and learning, and I can personally say that I am excited to try the strategies shared by Drs. Eder, Zakrajsek and Michaelsen in my own classroom next autumn.

Best regards,

Katherine Kelley