Teaching Philosophy

When I first started teaching, it was more of a method of learning for myself. As I would study for exams, I would find enjoyment in teaching the material to my peers, and, in turn, I found I understood the material better and better. As I continued to teach my classmates during study sessions, I thoroughly enjoyed many teaching aspects, but this did not ultimately draw me toward being an educator. I know now that the greatest reward of teaching is the experience of understanding and, beyond that, helping your learner understand the material they previously struggled to comprehend. This realization came during one of my pharmacy practice experiences. A mother struggled to remember essential information about her child's medications that her child needed for their long-term care. Because the mother could not efficiently measure the dose and understand the appropriate schedule, the team determined that she was too big of a risk to send home alone, and the child remained in the hospital until she could understand. One day, my preceptor and I spent an afternoon, as long as was needed, helping this mother grasp what was going on with the medications, and like an epiphany, she suddenly started to get it. She began crying tears of excitement as she understood what this knowledge meant to her, her baby, and their lives together. I teach for those moments where the understanding is worth every step along the way.

When I enter each learning experience, I hope to develop trust and rapport with each individual I meet. The learner should see me as an expert on the topic and someone they trust. Because of this, I will always be willing to admit my shortcomings to those that I am teaching so that, hopefully, they will be able to admit theirs to me. Even when designed as a lecture, teaching should be a discussion so that communications from both sides of the learning will nurture the environment and promote optimal learning. To develop this rapport, I rely on my ability to relate and show empathy to learners in any situation. I have had a student reach out to me during a lecture expressing how he felt ashamed that he did not appear to be learning the material the same way his classmates had touted after the tests. The student and I had a conversation about the many hardships that he will face throughout schooling and his career, and I assured him that he was not alone. It was a brief conversation, but what it created was a sense of understanding between that learner and myself. Following the interaction, he was much more open to feedback about what he needed to learn. He began to excel in the course that he was initially struggling in and believed in himself much more. It is interactions like this and the chance to see the successes of those who thought they were failing that make teaching incredibly worthwhile.

There are two sides to every learning experience, meaning that there are two sets of expectations for how that opportunity will play out. To assess whether or not my learners are gathering the information in the way that I would like for them to, I like to present increasingly complex challenges to determine if they truly understand the material. Rather than just asking the same or similar questions about the material, I like to pose different questions and question styles. While holding a topic discussion about drug overdoses, it became evident that my learner was becoming stagnant in their learning and was repeating information verbally that I had written on the discussion handout and making it appear as their knowledge. To see what they knew about the topic, I flipped the script and asked them to describe the mechanism by which a reversal agent would likely work for the medication. This adaption forced the student to think about the medication's pharmacodynamics, the mechanism of action, and what medical professionals would likely do to benefit the patient who had taken too much of that medication. When students can exhibit this kind of understanding, where they start to meet my challenges to satisfaction, I believe I have started to succeed as a teacher. The second side of the coin is making sure that the learners are receiving the education they desire. To determine this, I seek constant feedback from learners to gauge how they feel the encounter is going currently or how it went if we already completed the lesson. The last step I take is to make sure that the learning encounter is beneficial for the learner long term. In instances where I may see a learner again, such as a patient on a return visit, I will sometimes ask if things are going well with their medications and if my counseling helped them.

The final step in being a great teacher is accepting that I am not the perfect teacher and will always have room to grow. It is essential to know that, as a teacher, I must also be willing to be a learner when necessary. This notion is true for both my material and my craft. In the healthcare field, there are always advancements. If I am not willing to stay up to date about continuously updated and continuously changing information, the medical world will leave me behind. As bad as this would be for my abilities as a teacher, it would be even worse for those learners I have built trust with and with whom I have established a productive learning relationship. It is also crucial to continue to sharpen my craft as a teacher. As time passes and as I continue to teach new generations, their learning styles will change as time does. There will be new challenges to face, such as an online curriculum with the emergence of COVID-19. To be the best teacher I can be, I must not hide from change but embrace change to learn, advance, and improve my learners and myself. Ultimately, I must continue to better myself for my learners' betterment because there are no teachers without learners.