Heather Seitz on Essential Microbiology for Healthcare

Speaker: Heather Seitz, Johnson County Community College

Heather Seitz: Over 20 years of teaching in the community college classroom, I just struggled trying to find the right level of content to help my students become prepared, to really help my students navigate traditional textbooks, which had sort of encyclopedic amounts of information in them, which was great, but students couldn't really approach it. So in listening to students over years and years, I wanted to give them a resource that could help them understand microbiology, to have their textbook meet them where they're at so that they could engage with the material and then be prepared for class as we started to dive in. So I approached Norton and really thought about how can we design a textbook that will get them ready for class so that in class, when we're doing those active learning activities, they're ready, they're prepared, and they're gonna be able to engage with the material more deeply and we can add nuance and details and case studies and really bring in the richness of microbiology together and the students have come prepared by having that sort of scaffold or that base level of information.

Heather Seitz: After 20 years, I still love working with students and interacting with students. I'm still curious about what really helps them and supports them in their learning journey. I wanted to create a resource with this book that helps them see why it's important to their lives, why it's going to be important to their future healthcare profession, and also think about, how do they already know something about this material? I really enjoy seeing the "aha" moments on my students' faces when they connect something that they have learned to real life, or to an example, or perhaps to their future career. And so, I wanted to create a resource that helped bridge the gap between them walking in the door and leaving with the confidence of understanding what microbiology is all about and why it matters. We were thoughtful about how do we approach this where we want to, of course, give the students all of the concepts that they need to be successful in my class and understand the concepts of microbiology, but remove anything that they don't need. So we worked closely with our nursing advisory board to really keep students at the forefront, and that was really important to me. We traditionally will get into a room with a bunch of faculty and decide which textbook we like the best. And that's a great approach if faculty are choosing a textbook for faculty, but I wanted to really keep students at the center of the process throughout, so that we could think about what is it that the students need. And while I have all my favorite microbiology topics and I know lots of in-depth information about each one of them, sometimes our students need to start with a more basic essential concept before they can build in all of those other details.