Making Pharmacology exciting?

[allaboutnursing77]

Hi All,

I thank you in advance for your assistance here! I'm teaching Pharmacology this Fall to pre-licensure students. They are Direct Entry students starting a new career and this is their first semester of school. So, this is their very first Pharmacology class. EEK! Any tips on how to make this class less daunting, exciting, and overall fun? Any tips are appreciated.

I taught this once before and it's challenging content to keep exciting.

thanks in advance!

[SopranoKris, MSN, RN, NP]

Since they are DE students and not yet RNs, I would take the approach we had in nursing school. Our instructor would teach the meds by class/system and relate it back to physiology. Knowing the mechanism of action and how it impacts the body was most helpful in remembering each med.

We played games in class, using interactive clickers. I think there are phone apps now that do the same thing. You can create quiz games, like a Jeopardy format or a simple ABCD quiz. For example, we did a mock Jeopardy game topics such as "LOL in my Heart", "CNS", "Eye C U", "Every Breath You Take". It was so much fun and we actually retained the info better than learning from lecture or flash cards. If you're in an actual face-to-face class, you can have teams. If it's online, you can do an interactive quiz game. Certainly makes it fun and less boring :)

[allaboutnursing77]

@SopranoKris - thank you! This is really helpful stuff!