Innovation in anatomy teaching

Effective anatomy teaching and learning involves student engagement through a passionate teaching style and creative, purposeful learning activities that align with the professional goals of students. Traditionally students find anatomy difficult as it involves many new concepts and complex terminologies that students find dull and labor-intensive and they often concentrate their efforts on "memorizing" lists of names, a timeconsuming "surface" approach. Furthermore, many universities now offer fewer contact hours to teach anatomy and often there is also a limited availability of cadavers for study. The challenges of teaching anatomy in the modern world require anatomy to be taught more effectively, in less time and often with reduced resources. These modern challenges provide an exciting opportunity for the development of innovative approaches for teaching and learning anatomy that move away from the traditional didactic methods towards more engaging and stimulating approaches using practical, hands-on methods that have clinical significance and are related to the professional competencies required. Passionate (stimulating) learning approaches can lead to deep learning through understanding the information and fixing it into long-term memory and the ability to place this information into a broad picture relevant to their future professions. The specific approaches that have been described are "'whiteboarding" and drawing, use of play-doh, movement/singing/dancing, surface anatomy, and body painting which all encourage multi-sensory, 'hands-on' learning. Taking these new perspectives on traditional methods of teaching anatomy provides a much more engaging, motivating, inspiring and enjoyable environment for student learning. These new teaching and learning approaches produce students that can achieve the desired learning outcomes (higher grades), and are engaged, confident and self-direct learners.