The Best Teachers are Students: Experiences from the ACCP Academy’s Teaching and Learning Certification Program

Written by Mia Lussier, PharmD, MS

I started my career in academia with essentially zero experience as an academic educator. After graduating from Wilkes University Nesbitt School of Pharmacy in 2020, I completed a 2-year fellowship in pharmacy outcomes. As part of my fellowship, I co-mentored research APPE students but I did not have any official education in teaching: neither an academic APPE rotation, nor teaching certificate program. As a researcher, I was trained in dissemination, therefore I had experience sharing knowledge via academic poster and platform presentations at conferences and through peer-reviewed manuscripts which I thought would translate to being a qualified academic.

My first year in academia was a journey. Without formal education in teaching, I relied a lot on what worked for me as a student when preparing for my didactic teaching  and I stumbled my way through creating assessments. For experiential teaching, I did not have to precept ambulatory care APPE students until my second year, yet I also felt even more unprepared for this aspect of teaching. . My teaching evaluations were okay; but I felt like I had a lot of room for improvement, leading me to seek out opportunities to learn more about teaching. ACCP’s Teaching and Learning Academy seemed to be the perfect program, and I was lucky enough to receive sponsorship from the Ambulatory Care PRN to complete the program.

The Teaching and Learning Consultancy

When I completed the program, ACCP’s Teaching and Learning Academy consisted of 16 hours of core modules, 6 hours of focus sessions, and 4 hours of elective programming. This consisted of 1-2 hour live programming at the ACCP Annual Meeting as well as  virtual and on-demand programming. One of the most unique aspects of ACCP’s Teaching and Learning program was the twice-yearly teaching and learning consultancy. This session brings together current participants and program leaders to discuss real-world educational challenges. Within the session, a cohort of participants sets the stage with their current challenge either in teaching, precepting, or mentoring. Session members, including other participants and faculty, ask additional questions to gain context and then provide advice from their own experiences. Closing the loop, presenters ended their session by summarizing the advice they received. While I gained a lot from my own presentation discussing challenges with engagement using a flipped classroom model, I gained as much, if not more from listening to the other academy members sharing their challenges and academy faculty sharing their experiences.

Implementation of Exam Blueprints

I learned so much from completing ACCP’s Teaching and Learning program; far more than I can fit into this short article. Instead of providing a non-descript list, I would like to highlight one thing that I have implemented into my teaching. During one session the idea of an exam blueprint was described. I had seen exam blueprints before, being given several questions to create for an exam on each lecture by course coordinators. To create my exam questions, I would typically review my lecture slides and notes then start writing with little plan outside of hitting the correct number of questions. The Teaching and Learning lecture took the exam blueprint a step further, introducing the incorporation of Bloom’s Taxonomy into the exam blueprint to ensure a reasonable distribution of knowledge and application type questions. This year, I am the coordinator of our Integrated Pharmacotherapy Course in Pulmonary Disorder and created a blueprint that included number of questions per lecture broken down by knowledge or application. This led me to be much more intentional when question writing; and the anecdotal evidence from students about the exam was overwhelmingly positive.

Overall, I feel like I gained a wealth of knowledge and will continue to implement the things I have learned to better myself as an educator, ultimately improving the experience of students and helping to grow the next generation of pharmacists. At the time of writing this article, the Teaching and Learning Certificate Program has been retired with the possibility that it may re-emerge in the future.  If you would be interested in completing the program, I encourage you to reach out to the ambulatory care executive board so we can advocate with our representative from the Board of Reagents. Additionally, there are currently two other Academy Programs available on comprehensive medication management and billing and contracting in the outpatient setting. If either of those programs are of interest to you, or if the Teaching and Learning Certificate becomes available,  I encourage you to consider one of ACCP’s Academy programs because the best teachers are students.

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Mia Lussier, PharmD, MS

Clinical Assistant Professor

Department of Pharmacy Practice

Binghamton University

Johnson City, NY