Report of the 2010-2011 Academic Affairs Standing Committee.

According to the Bylaws of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP), the Academic Affairs Committee shall consider "... the intellectual, social, and personal aspects of pharmaceutical education. It is expected to identify practices, procedures, and guidelines that will aid faculties in developing students to their maximum potential. It will also be concerned with curriculum analysis, development, and evaluation beginning with the pre-professional level and extending through professional and graduate education. The Committee shall seek to identify issues and problems affecting the administrative and financial aspects of member institutions. The Academic Affairs Committee shall extend its attention beyond intra-institutional matters of colleges of pharmacy to include interdisciplinary concerns with the communities of higher education and especially with those elements concerned with health education." Consistent with a theme of exploring the way in which AACP might foster organizational improvement and success among its institutional members, President Rodney Carter charged the Committee to look at how the curriculum prepares graduates to function in the emerging "learning health care system" to be evidence-based, translational practice development leaders, including the effective use of information systems and tools (e.g., clinical decision support, Electronic Health Record/Personal Health Record, Medication Therapy Management systems); as well as the requisite attitudes and behaviors to build sustainable practices, either from existing practices or de novo. The Committee was also asked to consider the report of the 2008-09 Argus Commission and to suggest the areas needed for inclusion in pharmacy curricula for graduates to have the knowledge, skills and attitudes to facilitate practice advancement. (1) The Committee members considered the following questions: Is there something in graduates that we want that we may (or may not) currently be preparing them for? What are the traits that give students the tools to build and sustain sustainable practice models regardless of specific site? Is the issue that perhaps nothing is missing from the curriculum but rather how we do or do not "connect the dots"? In discussing these questions the Committee chose to focus the charge on those traits that foster and support a student's ability to build and advance sustainable models, recognizing that the AACP Center for the Advancement of Pharmaceutical Education (CAPE) Educational Outcomes 2004 represents more skills/cognitive side of what we are doing in our curricula while the traits discussed move more into the affective domain. (2) These traits include self-efficacy, self-assessment, reflection, entrepreneurship, and leadership and advocacy. In examining those traits, the following considerations were put forth: * Curriculum should be considered as it is most broadly defined inclusive of the didactic, experiential, co-curricular, and extra-curricular components. The Committee identified the need to provide students the opportunity to develop the traits above while still in a more protected environment in didactic, experiential, co-curricular, and extracurricular portions of the curriculum. In essence, asking--what is the "ingredient list" and what potential "recipes" should you use? * The expanded view of curriculum allows faculty to look at curricular elements already being done but not further identified by trait (i.e., students are not being held explicitly accountable in that manner thus resulting in a "hidden" curriculum). Identifying current curricular elements in this expanded view of the curriculum highlights existing opportunities without further contributing to curricular density. The purpose of this report is 1) to define traits in the affective domain that provide students with the tools to build and advance sustainable practice models and that can be addressed in the broadly defined curriculum and 2) to provide examples from the literature on how they have been incorporated into curricula. …