3C courses immerse students in pharmacy’s critical challenges

Conversations in Critical Challenges in Pharmacy (3C) courses are an evidence-based, high impact practice implemented into the first year of the MNspire curriculum at the University of Minnesota College of Pharmacy. They are aimed at increasing student success, engagement and community. 

Formatted similarly to the concept of a “first year seminar," 3C courses offer classes of about 20 students or less that prepare them with the skills needed to succeed in both the program and profession and provide a built-in sense of community during their first year of pharmacy school. Course topics such as pharmaceutical waste in the context of climate change, artificial intelligence in health care and consequences of racism in health care allow students to prepare for the changing pharmacy landscape through a myriad of lenses. 

“They're designed to foster those connections and to help students build skills that will help them in the program, particularly critical inquiry skills, but also writing and presentation skills,” said Dr. Kylee Funk, associate professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Care & Health Systems (PCHS) and 3C lead. “First year seminars in undergraduate programs have been very effective in creating an early experience that helps students succeed and stay in the program and develop those relationships with their peers and faculty. We’re translating that curricular design success into the pharmacy landscape.”

Each 3C topic can trace back to a critical challenge within the pharmacy profession outlined in the International Pharmaceutical Federation’s development goals. Rather than focusing on content and comprehensive exams, the courses contain real world applications— field trips, guest speakers from the industry, relevant projects— that teach students how to dig deep into a critical challenge in pharmacy and develop key skills through exploration of the challenge. 

“So much of what students typically do in the first year is learn facts. 3Cs aren’t about learning facts. In fact, it's supposed to be run in a way that the instructors don't teach— we facilitate, we create a structure that's intended to help facilitate student critical thinking,” said Dr. Todd Sorensen, senior executive associate dean for strategic initiatives and faculty affairs and professor in PCHS. “We're guiding and creating an experience for the students to manage their own discovery, learning and thinking.”

Prior to the beginning of their program, incoming students rank their interest in the 3C course offerings. Historically, every student has gotten one of their top three rankings, with most getting their first or second choice, Funk said. These courses also give faculty an opportunity to teach on topics that they’re passionate about while simultaneously building stronger relationships with students early on. Funk’s expertise, for instance, is rooted in diabetes, which is also the topic of her 3C course. 

“We have faculty excited to teach about their passion and maybe their research and I think we're offering cutting edge topics that are certainly helping students to think about the future,” Funk said. “The topics vary, but the skills that we're asking the students to build don't. We're giving them tools to think about critical inquiry, to look into the literature, to assess data, to learn what the real questions are— those tools will be important and will help them in their whole career.”

Sorensen currently co-instructs a 3C course on forecasting the future of pharmacy that’s intended to make students more in tune with how the pharmacy profession has changed over time and how it will continue to change in the future. 

“Sometimes students assume that what they see today in pharmacy is what it's going to be like for most of their career, because students just don't have that context to know how much things can change. This will be unlikely for the cohort in this 3C course,” Sorensen said. “They've had to look backwards a little bit, but mostly they had to look forwards. They talked with pharmacists, had readings, and all these things that help them understand that change is inevitable.” 

Sorensen is a panelist for the American Society of Health-Systems Pharmacists (ASHP) forecasting report each year and last year chaired the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) Argus Commission Forecast, identifying themes important to the pharmacy community, conducting analysis and creating projections for the future of the profession. He thought the forecasting methodology could also be impactful for pharmacy students and implemented it into the 3C course. In the first half of the semester, students explored the broad range of job opportunities within pharmacy, determined themes of interest, polled pharmacists, wrote research papers and developed items for their forecast survey. During the second half of the semester, students analyzed the results of that work. The course also resulted in a report from instructors summarizing student experience utilizing the forecasting methodology.  

“It seemed like it could be a really strong, immersive experience for first year students to discover what practice might look like early in their career rather than telling them what it might look like,” Sorensen said. “It just felt like it was a good way to expose the students to the career that they were going to be embarking on over the next 40 years or so in a fun but rigorous, didactic, more experiential way.”