CHCS - Perspectives Summer/Fall 2017

38 Nova Southeastern University Physician Assistant Fort Lauderdale Striking a Chord with Students: Enhancing Teaching with Music Pamela B. Jaffey, M.D., FCAP, PA, is an associate professor in the PA Fort Lauderdale Program. She is the course director of the Clinical Laboratory Medicine course and has also taught lectures for several other courses. AS AN ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR who has been teaching for 17 years, I was disappointed by poor student attentiveness during the early years. While I lectured, many students chatted amongst themselves, slept, or stared with glazed eyes. One of the problems was that my material could be quite dry. I decided to spice up my class by drawing upon my musical background. Initially, I learned to play piano as a child. I received vocal training during high school and had leading roles in high school musicals. I subsequently studied voice intermittently during my medical career. I decided to set lecture content to the melodies of simple, recognizable tunes, such as Old MacDonald Had a Farm . I then incorporated the songs as questions in a computerized audience response format. For the first time, students were laughing as a group while I sang about a hereditary bleeding disorder in which “Old MacDonald had a son who had many nosebleeds, and then this son had a daughter with heavy, long menses.” This positive feedback motivated me to create more musical parodies of medical topics. In addition to the Old MacDonald melody, other familiar tunes have been useful as templates for descriptions of many diseases and laboratory values. Examples include Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star; Take Me Out to the Ballgame; Do Your Ears Hang Low; This Old Man; and Itsy Bitsy Spider . The songs are typically associated with a question and presented in different formats. Over the years, I found that students enjoy singing along as a group participatory activity. I have encouraged the class to sing Happy Birthday to students celebrating birthdays. This simple activity promotes a warm atmosphere. I have recently composed two original songs for piano and voice to use for teaching in additional courses. The song An Army We Can’t See pays homage to the immune system. The initial part of the song reads, “An army we can’t see, fights battles silently, they are where they need to be, to defend effectively.” The song Three Fingers Three Pressures describes the technique of breast examination. In October 2014, I presented my techniques of teaching with music on a national level at an annual conference held by the Physician Assistant Education Association. Although I have not performed a study to assess whether the songs have aided in student recall of the material, I have received student feedback that has suggested this may be the case. In a course evaluation, one student made the following com- ment: “The songs were catchy and went along well with the tunes I already knew. When I learned the song, I found it so much easier to remember certain facts.” Some students have mentioned that they sang the songs the evening before an exam, and others stated they had a song in their mind while taking an exam. There are multiple ways that professors without a musical background can enhance their teaching with music. I would like to share my ideas. One suggestion is to play an instrumental recording as students are entering the classroom and settling into seats. This would pique their interest. Short videos with imagery combined with instrumental music can relax students