Lessons from the trenches: Implementing team-based learning across several courses

Pharmacy educators are improving education of professional program students by incorporating active learning techniques. Team-based learning “flips” the classroom, creating different roles for faculty and students compared to traditional lecture-based pedagogy. Implementing team-based learning on a large scale, such as across multiple semesters, introduces challenges that are distinct from implementation on a smaller scale. We describe our experience at the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy with adopting team-based learning in our curriculum. We adopted team-based learning as a unifying pedagogy across our five-semester therapeutics problem-solving course sequence. We experienced challenges distinct from those that accompany smaller scale adoption of an active learning pedagogy. Specifically, garnering faculty support, logistical issues, and implementation of the new pedagogy by faculty and students were all affected by the large scale of adoption. We share our experience with a large-scale pedagogical shift, highlighting challenges and lessons learned for other faculty in health professions education who may be interested in leveraging the benefits of active learning across several courses involving many faculty.