Drugs, the Brain, and Behavior: A Graduate Student-Run Comprehensive Course in Neuroscience

Drugs, the Brain, and Behavior is an interdisciplinary two-semester upper level course at Georgetown University designed to expose undergraduate and graduate students to broad areas of the neurosciences, to promote the development of scientific literacy in these students, and to provide pedagogical experience for Ph.D. students in the Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience (IPN) at all stages of training. Drugs, the Brain, and Behavior fulfills these goals through a unique model of student-teaching. This lecture-based, team-taught course is completely run and taught by Ph.D. students in the IPN. It is designed to gradually increase the teaching duties of new instructors, providing a structured setting for them to develop their pedagogical skills. We encourage scientific literacy in our students through the incorporation of primary literature and experimental results throughout the course. The strategies we have employed have increased student confidence on a variety of measures of scientific literacy. While running a team-taught course, we have also developed several strategies for coordinating team-taught courses within semesters and across years, which could easily be adapted to other courses.