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The Convergence of Excellence and Relevance

Colleagues, I stood before you 1 year ago as your president-elect to outline the leadership agenda for the next year. I stated that we need a more balanced way to reward the diversity of excellence that exists among us, especially with regard to excellence in teaching. We need to develop preceptors as integral to the quality of the education we offer, providing evidence-based standards of excellence which we can acknowledge publicly and to which preceptors can aspire. I asked for an improved balance of our advocacy portfolio in the areas of education and research scholarship. I described significant enhancements to our research and graduate education efforts. Finally, I said for all to hear in a manner as conspicuous as I could summon, pharmacy is a science-based profession. From the perspective of an educator whose greatest thrill and fulfillment in my career has come from teaching, I have said for years that we need an academic reward system that matches what we say in our literature and public statements, a system that rewards excellence in teaching in parity with excellence in scholarship. We aspire to excellence in all areas of our mission, but our people are diverse in passion and talent. Some of us are better at one element of our mission than others, whether that is teaching or scholarship. Excellence is worthy of reward, wherever it exists. A problem has been that our metrics for assessment of teaching excellence are less developed than for scholarship. That was among the charges that I asked Dr. Melissa S. Medina and her team on the Academic Affairs Committee to tackle. Education is the central mission of academic pharmacy. How can we evaluate and measure excellence in teaching? The committee contrasted scholarly teaching with the scholarship of teaching. They outlined and defined the 6 standards of scholarly teaching: * Clear goals * Adequate preparation * Appropriate methods * Significant results * Effective presentation * Reflective critique They describe in their report how to collect evidence in a systematic way and document it. Among their several recommendations to the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) is the creation of a fellow designation--FAACP--that would recognize excellence in scholarly teachers and the scholarship of teaching and learning. The most exciting part of the report that thrilled me right down to my college professor bones was proposed evaluation rubrics for each of the 6 standards of scholarly teaching. At last! We have at least the beginning ofa system we can use to qualitatively and quantitatively assess excellence in teaching, just as we have done for scholarship. To Melissa, staff liaison Cecilia Plaza, and members of the Academic Affairs Committee, thank you! We all agree that the quality of education that our students receive in the experiential program is just as important as any other part of the curriculum. It is the largest part of our curriculum. Much of the experiential curriculum is conducted by preceptors who are not fulltime professional educators, often volunteers. Based on a demanding and rigorous program for documenting excellence among public schoolteachers in Mississippi, called Master Teachers, I asked Dr. Betty J. Harris and her team on the Professional Affairs Committee to consider how we can create a similar development and recognition program for pharmacy preceptors. I want standards of excellence we can all recognize and offer to our preceptors as evidence of what we and they aspire to achieve. Utilizing a variety of resources and with the invited contributions on the committee of key staff and leaders from the American Pharmacists Association, the American College of Clinical Pharmacy, and the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists, the committee has proposed a national "master preceptor" recognition program, to be administered by AACP, based on rigorous criteria assembled in a portfolio of evidence, evaluated by the leadership of the Experiential Education Section and representatives of national practice organizations. …