Establishing a successful teaching assistant program in pharmacy skills laboratory courses

Laboratory-based courses often require more manpower than faculty can provide to facilitate active learning activities in the classroom as well as skills-based assessments.

Pharmacy and graduate student and resident teaching assistants (TAs) can be incorporated into laboratory-based courses to help meet this need. Before using student and resident TAs in laboratory-based courses, a number of items need to be considered. This paper will discuss how to recruit, train, and evaluate student and resident TAs. It will also detail the benefits to the faculty, the students in the classroom, and the TAs themselves. Finally, lessons learned from five schools of pharmacy who use student and/or resident TAs will be shared.

Schools of pharmacy should implement a formalized process for utilizing student and resident TAs in laboratory-based courses especially where faculty manpower limitations exist.