‘F L IP PING’
ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY
Department of Biomedical Sciences Assistant Professor Amanda Haage talks ‘flipped’ classrooms and cell migration Amanda Haage, Ph.D., is an assistant professor in the
And you have research interests in both the active learning
UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences Department of
environment and cellular movement?
Biomedical Sciences. Among other duties, she’s responsible
Essentially, my task when I got hired was to revise the anatomy
for teaching the two-semester anatomy and physiology courses
and physiology [A&P] courses at UND. We used to have
to hundreds of UND undergraduate students each year. She sat
standalone A&P courses, taught by separate people. But the
down with North Dakota Medicine recently to discuss, “flipped”
best practice nationally now is a combined A&P sequence
classrooms, cell migration, and student engagement.
of courses—A&P 1 and 2, taught together based on organ
Thanks for your time, Dr. Haage. You’re relatively new to North Dakota, yes? How did you end up here? I grew up in southeastern Iowa, south of Iowa City. I stayed in-state for my education: a bachelor’s degree in biology at Wartburg College, and a Ph.D. at Iowa State. I got my doctorate there while my husband did his [Doctor of Veterinary Medicine]. Then we went to Vancouver, British Columbia, for my postdoctoral work for five years. When I went on the job market, we wanted to come back to the Midwest for lots of reasons—cost of living, speed of life. UND had an opening
systems. I was asked to rebuild that from scratch. It was a huge course redesign, and we launched it in fall 2020—online. It’s been good. We’ve been asked to speak on our model at the Anatomy & Physiology Society and other conferences. The courses are pretty novel in that I really try to focus on direct application of the content. It’s active learning, completely flipped courses. I have recorded lectures students can watch, but they do activities that range from drawing different anatomical structures to reading and answering questions about cases studies.
and I applied and ended up really liking it here, and I guess the
Say more about that—how might an instructor “flip”
feeling was mutual.
an anatomy course in an active way to get beyond the traditional memorization and lecture-test format? We know now that just lectures and tests aren’t the best
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