Things I Wish I Knew Before Teaching A&P
I started teaching anatomy and physiology right out of undergrad, in a closet.
The closet was tucked behind the whiteboard in the anatomy lab, packed with old Walmart bags (the blue ones with yellow smiley faces) that crumbled when picked up. Under the flaking plastic there were desiccated crickets that I swept away. Along the wall, a bookshelf housed jarred fetal specimens, ranging in size from my pinky fingernail to my fist. I was not sure when the last time a developmental biology course had been offered, or if those would be pulled out next time the class rolled around. To my friends, I called my office the fetus closet. It was mysterious and awesome.
That was the summer "Shake It Off" was everywhere, and I jammed to it while scrubbing years of dust off the desk stashed by the door. Once my aggravated allergies were alleviated, I hung my lab coat on the closet door and planned six sections of intro A&P lab from scratch. The work conducted in the fetus closet is my origin story.
Anyone who has taught A&P knows that the work of teaching A&P for the first time is like being handed a firehose and being told to fill a glass. I came in with a lot of enthusiasm and lots of questions about how to support student learning outcomes. Before I knew really anything, I handed out a learning styles questionnaire, tallying how many students scored as visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learners on each section's folder, where I stored quizzes and practicals. I gave students a handout about different learning-styles-informed study strategies. I didn't know what an IRB was or the process of research, so thankfully I did not try to take my well-intentioned survey further.
At the time, I thought I was onto something. I was — to borrow a phrase I use with students missing the mark by a small-to-medium bit — on the right track.
Getting on the right track is the premise of this post. If I could sit down with the version of me hanging her lab coat on that closet door, here's what I'd tell her.
1. LEARNING STYLES ARE NOT A THING.
Once I became introduced to education research literature, I quickly found that learning styles have been thoroughly debunked. Visual, kinesthetic, auditory learning styles seem reasonable, and they gave me something to organize my early teaching around, but the underlying claim (that a student's "style" determines how well they learn different types of content) doesn't hold up. At the end of the day, the questionnaire I distributed measured preferences, but students learn across multiple modalities. In fact, if I could tell her more, I would emphasize that delivering course materials in multiple modalities is an important practice to support all student learning, as described in frameworks like Universal Design for Learning.
2. You can only control your controllables.
Students have expectations. If I could go back in time, I might have warned former me about the types of expectations they have, and reiterate: all student expectations are out of her control. Some students will enter class with expectations of her that have nothing to do with teaching effectiveness. I've had students comment on my clothes, tell me I should only ever teach in a kindergarten and not a college classroom, and talk back to me in ways that immediately stopped when colleagues who were men entered the room. That bias is not controllable.
What is inside my control is course design and delivery. The same dynamic that made some students dismissive made other students feel unusually safe and seen, because of the way I chose to build the room. Designing a course is about providing opportunities for learning; students who hated the pitch of my voice chose not to engage, but students who accepted the invitation learned just fine.
3. Concept first, jargon second.
When I first started teaching, I thought a good explanation was one that incorporated all the terms in the first explanation. A birds-eye view would give the complete and accurate picture all at once. Any introductory anatomy and physiology class, whether in high school or in college, asks students to absorb a huge amount of complexity that was never built with an on-ramp from their starting point. Textbooks don't scaffold this. Courses often don't either.
To do a bottom-up instead of a top-down approach, you have to build the scaffold yourself. Make sure a student understands the underlying concept (e.g., what it means for there to be pressure in a tube) before you hand them the vocabulary word for it. Teach the ideas behind the processes before adding characteristics like "hydrostatic" or "osmotic." Do it in the other order, and you get memorization without any actual understanding underneath it, which is the exact failure mode I'm trying to help teachers avoid.
4. Modeling matters.
My first year teaching, I spent several hours scrubbing clay off of those Tiny Tim anatomy models each time the muscle unit rolled around. It felt pointless, and as an hourly worker, time spent scrubbing kept me from the things I was really excited to do, like write assessments (I have odd interests). But, it was also the last institution I taught at that had access to those models – and I learned after the fact how much I underappreciated the learning impact of opportunities provided by those clay-sculpting activities.
Having students physically build things does something that looking at an anatomical illustration can't. Whether sculpting a structure in 3D or creating a diagram that outlines processes, modeling necessitates that structure exists in a student's hands before you ask them to reason about function. I’m still learning ways to do this better, but that’s part of maturing from sage on the stage to guide on the side — students need something to do.
5. Don't just teach the cells and tissues once.
The way textbooks are laid out, cells and tissues are defined at the beginning of the semester and then are not discussed in depth. As a tutor, sometimes I will get students in the muscular or nervous systems (only within a month of them finishing the cells unit) and they have not connected that the specialized cell types of these systems are cells, and that the cells work together in specialized tissues unique to these organ systems.
If you teach cellular and tissue-level content once, in unit one, and never come back to it, it might as well not have happened. Levels of organization are a lens you should be reapplying all semester, or the earlier material gets orphaned.
Here's what that orphaning looks like in practice: you get to the digestive system, and you're talking about how stomach epithelium has cells that secrete hydrochloric acid next to cells secreting mucus. By that point, students have often already forgotten what's even in a cell membrane, or that epithelial tissue lines nearly everything in the body, or that it has an apical and basal side that matters functionally. The connections back to "remember cells, remember tissue" have to be built into every unit, not assumed to transfer from week two.
6. A&P is for more than healthcare.
This one is almost philosophical, but it changed how I taught. A&P gets treated as a gatekeeping course — a barrier to be cleared on the way to a nursing or an allied health program. And sure, that's often the reason students enroll. But at its core, A&P is a class about understanding the human body. That's a more universal experience than a tough prerequisite you have to get through before starting the career you want.
Once I stopped treating "relevant example" as synonymous with "clinical example," the class got better. Lived experience, like the confusion of a relative not understanding a symptom or what a lab result from the doctor’s office means, provides a tangible opportunity for students to apply what they know. Healthcare examples still show up when I teach, but giving students examples relevant to their current experience and not just their future careers opens another door for engagement.
7. Stay curious about your students.
Remember that learning-styles tally I mentioned from the first time I taught A&P? I eventually tried to answer a question with those data: did different learning styles relate to course outcomes in a super visual course? Short answer: no. Learning styles didn't predict performance, which is what the research on the topic already says.
But the exercise wasn't wasted, because it made me pay much closer attention to the distribution of grades and understanding across a class. And that closer attention has been useful: it helped me recognize misconceptions that popped up, semester after semester, class after class. In my first semester teaching, students in five out of the six sections insisted to me that the brain is not an organ at the beginning of the nervous system unit. I would never have thought that this misconception existed in a 200-level class. Curiosity about where your students are, and how they're reasoning, is what lets you find the disconnects between what you're teaching and what's landing. That curiosity is the through-line I'd tell past me to hold onto: curiosity powers science teaching and learning.
Another Thought for New A&P Teachers
These are the things I'd tell the version of me scoring quizzes in the fetus closet, wondering how to make different concepts stick. But if I had a little more to offer any first-time A&P teacher reading this now: you can transform the firehose. Once you find the underlying logic of the class — instead of trying to hold all of it in your head at once — you are able to build better scaffolds and connections between topics. For students, the material becomes manageable, and you get to be a lot more intentional about meeting students where they are.
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