Team teaching of physiology to health professional students

Most basic science courses for medical, dental, pharmacy, and other health professional students are taught by more than one teacher. Faculty are recuited to teach their area of expertise for a week or two. Consequently, students experience a parade of unrelated facts and concepts. After teaching this way for a couple of years, we developed a series of strategies to overcome-the disconnectedness of this system. These strategies for our six credit hour one semester class of 190 pharmacy, dental and physician associate students were as follows: 1. Three of us took on areas of physiology that were not our areas of research and expertise. This gave four teachers for the seven areas. 2. Our course syllabus of about four pages of outlined lecture notes per class was edited by all of us at a series of group meetings. 3. We designed a common format for weekly review sessions, consisting of practice calculations or thought questions, sample multiple-choice questions, and one or two clinical cases for integration. 4. We all participated in the first class on control systems, and two teachers collaborated on a session on exercise. 5. We referred to concepts that were common to one another's lectures and sometimes used the same overhead transparencies. 6. We attended each other's lectures from time to time. 7. More than one faculty member wrote some exam questions.