Faculty Advisor Spotlight on Karen Dougherty, Hopkinsville Community College (KY)

Students are “crazy to sign-up and I’m crazy to teach it, but it works,” says Karen Dougherty of her accelerated Anatomy and Physiology I course at Hopkinsville Community College. Her class meets for two hours and 15 minutes four days a week in order to complete the course in just eight weeks. Dougherty says this is a perfect length of time per class because it, “keeps students really focused with no time to forget the information.” This unique class structure accommodates Dougherty’s non-traditional students who are mostly military personnel. While this course structure allows for a lot of hands-on time in the classroom, students take home what they learn for concept practice. That’s where MasteringA&P comes in.

MasteringA&P is incorporated as a learning tool in Dougherty’s courses (she also teaches A&P II) because it’s a low-risk learning aid that complements what students are learning in class. Not only does it give students an opportunity to practice concepts they’ve just learned, it also helps them to prepare for new concepts they’ll be learning in the next class. Dougherty assigns pre-class reading assignments in MasteringA&P to give students a “mental map of concepts” they’ll be learning the next day. With the addition of these reading assignments, Dougherty noticed an “elevated quality of classroom discussion” because students are coming to each class partially prepared with their “feet on the ground” in concepts they haven’t yet learned about in class.

Another bonus to these pre-class reading assignments is that there’s “no ambiguity about what [Dougherty] expects you to know,” before coming to class. In fact, the ability for MasteringA&P to prepare students before coming to class led to students asking for more work in MasteringA&P to help them. Dougherty puts up no-credit, practice questions for students to work though in MasteringA&P and students are doing the work because they know these questions are helping them learn. Dougherty has even overheard a student telling another that, “if you do your Mastering work, you’ll be fine” in the course.

The comfort level MasteringA&P creates with the concepts is a very appealing feature of Dougherty’s course. Students ask to be moved into her course even though it’s taught at such an accelerated pace. Other faculty are converting to MasteringA&P users as well.

Relatively new to the Faculty Advisor program, Dougherty has already seen that becoming a Faculty Advisor is making her a better Mastering user. Being a Faculty Advisor has allowed her to expand her own skill set within Mastering, helping her to best utilize the program for her needs.

Dougherty is new to our Faculty Advisor program because she hasn’t been an instructor for all that long. Up until 2007, Dougherty was a pediatrician until an opportunity to serve as a temporary replacement as an instructor in the middle of a term changed everything. Now she recycles her on-the-job knowledge as a physician to make what she teaches in Anatomy & Physiology courses “authentically relevant.” The long hours and high demands of being a doctor translated perfectly into first-hand stories of the practical uses for all the concepts covered in an A&P course. And though she does miss the time spent with all the “little folks” that came in for appointments when she was a pediatrician, Dougherty loves her students and enjoys getting to see the impact her experience and technology like Mastering have on them.

Do you teach non-traditional students in your course? What are some of the differences you've seen between teaching traditional vs non-traditional students? Have you had to modify your course structure to cater to our students?