Selective Activities

Dates of Activity: 7/19/2021-7/22/2021

Description of Experience: During the Spring of 2021, I applied to be a Walmart Scholar. This application process required me to describe my interest in academia and display my knowledge of the three pillars of higher education. I used much of the knowledge I gathered during my first year in this program to formulate my application. Once accepted as a Walmart Scholar, I was able to attend the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy Annual Meeting virtually. There were several opportunities to learn about current trends in academia. However, the main reason that I attended the conference, and the reason that Walmart Scholars receive funding for the conference, was the Teacher's Seminar. This was a multiday session that provided information from seasoned educators with an abundance of academic knowledge.

What I learned: The topic of the Teacher's Seminar was lesson planning through design thinking. This concept uses empathy to help develop a lesson plan that is tailored to specific learners and their needs. For instance, if I was to teach a course on pharmacokinetics to third-year pharmacy students, I would first place myself in their shoes and think about my baseline knowledge, my comfort in the material, and my expectations. I would take these thoughts and then develop a lesson plan that is meant to account for each of the thoughts. The lesson should be carefully thought over and account for any potential shortcomings prior to delivering the material. Next, the educator would then teach their lesson and receive feedback from the learners and other trained educators. At this point, the educator would address needed changes and continue to adapt their teaching to meet the needs of current and future learners.

Dates of Activities: 1/3/2022-3/18/2022

Description of Experience: As previously mentioned, I am currently enrolled in a Master of Education in Health Professions program through A.T. Still University. This course was the first course of my first semester in the program. It is completely online and aims to discuss the current practices of health profession educators. The most interesting part of this course is that it is an interprofessional course that contains many different health professionals. I was able to get a slight glimpse into what their curriculum was like. It was also helpful that many of the students are from different eras of health care. This means that not only was the profession different in their curriculum, but the timeline of their learning was different, as well.

What I learned: This 10-week long course taught me several things about teaching as a health professional. It not only focused on how to teach upcoming health professionals or current peers, but it also focused on the education that may be necessary to teach our patients. Some of the topics covered include social determinants of health, universal design for learning, cross-cultural education, HyFlex education, and many more. I was able to work with my classmates to determine what strategies were beneficial in each kind of curriculum and learning situation. The final portion of the course was to create a professional development plan focusing on how I would continue to progress in the future. It was helpful to see where I currently stand as an educator and look at how I hope to grow in the future.

Materials:

Dates of Activities: 3/28/2022-Present

Description of Experience: This course is the second course of my first semester in the A.T. Still Master of Education in Health Professions program. It is completely online and aims to discuss new methods for teaching. It was the first time that I had heard of other models of teaching besides pedagogy. This course is also interprofessional and was slightly larger and more diverse in experience than my previous course. I was able to see what experiences my classmates had experienced with learning outside of pedagogy.

What I learned: So far during this course, we have learned about teaching theories such as constructivism, behaviorism, and cognitivism. We discussed as a group which theory we felt we resonated with the most and could effectively use in our classrooms. We have also learned about learner-centered and learner-driven models of teaching or andragogy vs heutagogy. It was during this week that we also discussed experiential education. This was a week that I felt comfortable with the material because most of my teaching involved experiential education. Currently, we are discussing metaliteracy and how to provide informational material in a way that various learners understand it and can disseminate it to others.