A&P rant, part 2: solutions!
November 24, 2019One reaction to my previous post might be, “OK, Dr. Crowther, you’ve explained what you’re against, but what are you FOR? Do you just want anatomy & physiology courses to be easier?”
Not exactly. I have three broad recommendations.
(1) Make the workload of each course consistent with its number of credits. This is, fundamentally, an issue of equitable access and fairness. If you teach a 5-credit course in such a way that students’ weekly workload is 40-plus hours, that effectively excludes people with complicated lives — for example, those who have to do a lot of childcare, who have to work lots of hours of paid employment, or who have a disability that slows them down. If you really want your students to do 10 credits’ worth of work, consider options like breaking your course into two 5-credit courses.
(2) Approach the material as elaborations of and variations on a small number of unifying core concepts. Students’ only real hope of retaining anything “permanently” is to revisit that thing repeatedly. So … let’s help them repeatedly revisit the most important things — the “big ideas” or “core concepts.” For physiology, at least, there is plenty of support for this — a recent book by Joel Michael et al. has defined the core concepts of physiology, and a small organization (the Physiology Majors Interest Group, or P-MIG) is exploring how our teaching can be re-centered around the core concepts.
(3) Focus on competencies (skills) as well as content (facts). It is telling that both Vision & Change (for teaching college biology) and the Next Generation Science Standards (for teaching K-12 science) not only outline what information should be covered, but also define what students should be able to do with that information. Thus, alongside five core concepts, Vision & Change lists six competencies: the ability to apply the process of science, the ability to use quantitative reasoning, the ability to use modeling and simulation, the ability to tap into the interdisciplinary nature of science, the ability to communicate and collaborate with other disciplines, and the ability to understand relationships between science and society. Similarly, the NGSS include eight science and engineering practices alongside their disciplinary core ideas. We must give students the opportunity to practice these skills, even if less content gets covered as a result.
[Update, Nov. 26: why yes, this series now has a third part!]
Above: four of the core concepts of anatomy & physiology, as illustrated in Human Anatomy & Physiology by Erin Amerman (2016).
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