Dan Brown, PharmD
Director of Faculty Development
Palm Beach Atlantic University

Email: daniel_brown@pba.edu

Dan Brown, PharmD, is currently the Director of Faculty Development at Palm Beach Atlantic University and a Professor of Pharmacy Practice in the Lloyd L. Gregory School of Pharmacy, located in West Palm Beach, Florida. In addition to faculty development functions, he teaches courses in spiritual and professional values, applications of critical thinking to patient care, and clinical pharmacokinetics. Dan became interested in team-based learning in 2010 and converted one of his courses, “Clinical Applications of Pharmacokinetic Dosing and Monitoring,” from traditional lecture to TBL in 2011. He subsequently completed the TBLC program to become a certified team-based learning trainer in 2012. Dan is a vocal proponent of TBL within his institution, promoting it as the most comprehensively effective pedagogy yet devised by mankind, and offers TBL workshops to interested faculty who would like test it out or get started.

TBL Innovations: I have made two innovations in my own course that have augmented the benefits of TBL. The first is a “memory quiz,” which consists exclusively of critical factual information that students need to memorize in order to be able to recall with a high level of automaticity. It is a fill-in-the-blank quiz that students take every couple of weeks (the same quiz). Because they know exactly what is on the memory quiz and merely need to regurgitate the answer, students do not receive credit unless they score 100%. The repetitive recall process ensures successful, long-term retention and facilitates the rapid retrieval of such information when students are engaged in problem-solving. The other innovation is a “Take Home Points” slide that follows the discussion of every application exercise. Sharing the purpose of the exercise and the specifics of what I expected students to learn from it, helps bring closure to the discussion and ensures that all students understand the critical points. I think it is so important to have a comprehensive summation at the end of every application exercise. In fact, from my perspective, “Summation” is important enough to be thought of as a 5th S.