Check out Part 1 of our interview with Dr. Jessica Burchette, Associate Professor of Pharmacy Practice at East Tennessee State University Bill Gatton College of Pharmacy. She is a clinical pharmacist who helped lead the recent curriculum changes at the college. 

Transcript:

Stephen Woodward:

Stephen Woodward:

Michele Williams:

Stephen Woodward:

Jessica Burchette:

Michele Williams:

Jessica Burchette:

I think of a curriculum as one of two things. One is a roadmap. We have a goal in mind that all of our graduates will be excellent pharmacists who take care of the public and serve their communities, and so we need a roadmap to make sure they get there efficiently, in the right order.

The other thing a curriculum is, to me, is like packing a suitcase. If you're going on a trip, you need the right proportion of the right things in order to be successful at your destination. And so when we’re thinking about a curriculum in terms of education, it’s both the science skills — understanding how the body works and how drugs work — and also understanding how to implement those and communicate those to patients, how to communicate with other health care professionals, and how to make good decisions financially and with the resources that patients might have.

And so there’s a lot of different aspects to a curriculum, and our job is to make sure we have all those placed at the right time, in the right order, and in the right proportion to give our students the launch that they need to move into their careers.

Stephen Woodward:

Jessica Burchette:

However, what we’re talking about today is a big change, because we revised our curriculum to have a totally different outlook and mindset compared to what we’re calling our legacy curriculum.

I would say this began around COVID. That’s a marker that everyone remembers. We were starting to see in our graduates maybe some places where our curriculum was not meeting their needs as quickly as it could.

So we sat down as a faculty and asked, what is our goal? What are we trying to create? What can we be really good at?

Here at Gatton, we can be really good at creating pharmacists who can impact their communities the day they graduate. They should not need extra training to be practice-ready. While many of our students choose to pursue additional training and have great success, we want to make sure that when our students leave here, they are ready to impact their communities immediately.

And so we asked, what are the key things a pharmacist should know at graduation? And that question really drove our curricular change.

The other driver is that things are always changing in medicine. We’re always learning, and so we need to teach our students how to teach themselves once they graduate, because the information we teach them will be out of date quickly. They need the tools and the skills to go out, learn new information, and digest it as it becomes available.

So those were really the two main drivers of changing our curriculum.

Michele Williams:

Jessica Burchette:

We started by going back to our mission and vision. What is Gatton here to do? What makes us unique? And how do we lean into that?

Then we mapped out what we believed to be the most important competencies and outcomes for our graduates. Once we had that big picture, we worked backward. We asked, what foundational knowledge needs to happen first? What skills need to be layered in? Where do we need repetition? Where do we need integration?

It was not a quick process. It involved a lot of meetings, a lot of discussion, and honestly, a lot of humility — because sometimes we had to admit that something we had done for a long time might not be the best approach anymore.

We also gathered feedback from alumni, preceptors, and students. We asked them where they felt strong and where they felt less prepared. That external feedback was really important in shaping the direction we took.

Then came the work of restructuring courses — deciding what to move, what to combine, what to expand, and what to remove. And that part required collaboration across departments, because no one course stands alone.

So mechanically, it was a lot of mapping, revising, presenting proposals, getting approval, revising again — and continuing to refine as we implemented.

Stephen Woodward:

Jessica Burchette:

And we’ve continued to adjust as we go. Curriculum change is not something you do once and then walk away from. It’s something you continue to evaluate and refine.