Faculty Spotlight: Adam Persky — Research in the Classroom
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Faculty Spotlight: Adam Persky — Research in the Classroom
While Persky holds a PhD in pharmaceutical science, he veered away from traditional research to focus on his passion for teaching. Much of his research now comes in the form of looking for new and better ways to instruct his students, which is especially important considering the difficulty of the courses he teaches.
“Since I’ve been here, I’ve tried different things to engage students, to get them to appreciate my area of expertise a little bit more because pharmacokinetics is typically one of the more hated courses in the pharmacy curriculum throughout the country,” Persky says. “It’s very math-based, and math scares a lot of students. So everything I’ve done to date has been aimed at helping students learn what they need to learn so they can apply it.”
To that end, he has devised various exercises and games to make the classroom more interactive. His favorite exercise so far is a game in which he creates a crime-scene investigation scenario using characters from popular TV shows such as House and Grey’s Anatomy. In the scenario, a victim dies from a drug interaction, and the students have to work in groups to piece together about fifty clues to figure out the culprit and how the crime occurred.
Persky says the interactive classroom activities require adjustments by both the students and the teacher.
“Students are used to sitting there and just writing notes, so when you try to do something different with them, they get a little skittish,” he says.
“And it’s harder for me to do those sorts of things because I have no idea what’s going to happen at the end of class. If I go there and lecture, I know exactly how it’s going to go. I have everything planned. But when the students have input, ask me questions, and have ideas, it forces me to do things differently, which forces me to develop different ways to approach it.”
The unexpected, however, can be a positive, as Persky found out during one of the crime-scene investigation games.
“Last year, one of the students had a very long, very detailed answer of what happened,” he says. “I had to sit down for it because it took so long for him to explain it. But he incorporated almost every aspect of the clues into it and really made it sound quite reasonable. It was something I never even thought of.
“When you design things that are out of the ordinary, such as games, I can't predict what will go on and what should happen, but sometimes things just happen and you go, ‘Well, I didn’t expect that, but I’m glad that happened,’ or ‘I’m glad that question was asked.’ ”