Exploring Teaching Opportunities During Residency Training

Alexandra Della Pia, PharmD MBA
Clinical Assistant Professor and Lymphoma Clinical Pharmacy Specialist
Ernest Mario School of Pharmacy, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Hackensack University Medical Center
Hackensack, NJ

Matthew Daniels, PharmD
Bone Marrow Transplantation Clinical Pharmacy Specialist
Oklahoma University Medical Center
Oklahoma City, OK

With a variety of learning experiences during your residency year, teaching may not be a requirement. Yet, as a future clinical pharmacist, your primary role will be to serve as the medication expert for your service, meaning your day-to-day will most likely include teaching. You will teach your team about drug initiation or dose adjustments, educate patients about a new medication, and/or act as a teacher for the learners on your rotation. After residency, you may even be interested in pursuing clinical positions affiliated with pharmacy schools or residency programs, which will re-quire you to precept students and residents, respectively. Exploring teaching opportunities as a resident will help you begin to develop your teaching style and gain insight into potential career paths.

Selecting meaningful teaching opportunities can be challenging as a resident, especially when your time is limited, your interests are evolving, and you aren’t sure how to obtain these experiences. Below we share our thoughts on teaching opportunities available to residents.

Teaching Certificate Program
As a pharmacy resident, you may be given the opportunity to participate in a teaching certificate program with a local school of pharmacy. Depending on your level of interest in teaching (ranging from uncertain through passionate), participating in a teaching certificate program is a good place to start.

These programs vary in terms of topics and meeting, but generally offer lessons on how to write learning objectives, prepare lectures, create exam questions, and adapt your teaching style for different learners. Some of the benefits of participating in a teaching certificate program include the opportunity to create and present your own lecture to pharmacy students, as well as to gain skills and resources to be an effective preceptor or faculty member.

In addition, most teaching certificate programs encourage you to develop your personal teaching philosophy, which is something many residents have not yet written but may need when applying to faculty positions after residency. Lastly, you will have a lot of opportunities for networking with your colleagues since pharmacy residents from many programs in the surrounding area may participate in the teaching certificate program.

Precepting Pharmacy Students and/or PGY1 Pharmacy Residents
Depending on your residency year or site, you may be offered the opportunity to precept pharmacy students or postgraduate year one (PGY1) pharmacy residents. If precepting is not a requirement for your program, we suggest that you reach out to your residency pro-gram director (RPD) or faculty preceptors to let them know you are interested so they can help to identify times of the year when you may be able to precept learners. There are many ways to get involved with precepting based on your desire to teach and the amount of time you have to commit amongst your residency projects and commitments.

If you do not feel you can precept a rotation due to time intensity, then precepting a student or resident on an in-service, journal club, or case presentation may be right for you. Precepting these types of learning experiences is often less cumbersome as it mainly involves reviewing drafts, providing feedback, and being present to support your learner on the day of his or her presentation.

If you are more passionate about teaching or trying to further develop your teaching style, then precepting a student or resident on a rotation may be more fruitful for you. Serving as a rotation preceptor will challenge you to meet the learner at his or her level of understanding and help you find different ways to describe processes, mechanisms of action, and disease state etiologies. Not only does this help the student or resident learn about managing a new or complex disease state, but also helps you cement the information you’re learning much faster. Many residents decline precepting opportunities due to a lack of confidence early on in the residency year (trust us, we’ve been there), but we encourage you to take these opportunities when they are presented. You most likely know more than you give yourself credit for!

In-service Presentations
In-service presentations are a great way to incorporate a teaching experience into your residency year, especially if other opportunities (such as a teaching certificate program or precepting) are not available. In-service presentations are shorter presentations based on the needs and interests of your audience, and can be given to multidisciplinary teams, nurses, and staff pharmacists. As a future clinical pharmacist, your primary role will be to serve as the medication expert; your day-to-day will likely include teaching your team and patients.

This teaching opportunity is a beneficial way to practice disseminating information according to your target audience. For example, when giving an in-service presentation to nurses, you may focus on monitoring parameters, side effects, and drug administration while only briefly mentioning dosing and drug interactions. On the other hand, when providing an in-service presentation to staff pharma-cists, it may be more beneficial to elaborate on dose adjustments, indications, drug interactions, and other nuances to help with order verification. In-service presentations can help further develop your teaching skills by challenging you to think of a topic from a different point of view and anticipate what information your audience may want to know.

Miscellaneous Teaching Experiences
There are a few other teaching opportunities that may be part of your residency program or about which you can ask your RPD and preceptor. One way to have a more formal teaching experience is to present an Accreditation Council for Pharmacy Education (ACPE) seminar. This accredited seminar can be presented to the pharma-cy department at your hospital or through a third party (such as a pharmacy school or conference) where attendees received continuing education (CE) credit.

Some of the benefits of presenting an ACPE-accredited seminar include presenting to a larger audience, creating assessment questions to gauge audience comprehension, and becoming the expert on a topic. You will review current literature and comment on its application to clinical practice. Another way to get teaching experience is to reach out to faculty preceptors or mentors for the chance to teach a lecture during a pharmacy school course or lead a student seminar for students on rotation. These are both great ways to gain experience teaching students, further develop your teaching style, and learn more about a career in academia.

In summary, there are many ways to explore teaching opportunities as a pharmacy resident. Whether you are uncertain about your interest in teaching or hope to be a preceptor someday, we suggest including at least one of these experiences in your residency year. The skills you develop will undoubtedly help you in your future career.