Oregon State University | Veterinary Clinical Sciences
“Critically Diverse”
Lack of diversity in veterinary medicine is worse than almost all other healthcare professions in the USA. Through active participation in pipeline programs, mentorship, and efforts to reduce bias in our selection process, veterinarians can improve diversity in our field and in the specialty of veterinary emergency and critical care. We need to leverage diversity as an asset which can enhance collective performance across a broad range of contexts. Creating inclusive environments which foster a culture of curiosity, empathy, kindness and belonging in which students feel cared for as a learner is vital. I strive to understand the mechanism of learning, how it is implemented in the brain and how students/trainees can be more effective learners. Knowledge is constructed, not passively transferred; it is assembled around information, past experiences and the surrounding environment.
My goal is to create learning environments in the clinical setting in which students feel safe, seen, heard, valued and respected. I would like to practice culturally responsive teaching which recognizes the unique identities, backgrounds and cultures of students. Culturally responsive pedagogy is an evidence-based teaching approach that makes meaningful connections between what students learn in school and their cultures, environments, languages, and lived experiences. These associations facilitate student access to a rigorous curriculum, develop higher-level academic skills, and help them understand the significance of what they learn at school and the world they live in (Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain by Dr. Zaretta Hammond).
The healthcare team in the veterinary ICU setting provides comprehensive care for patients with acute and chronic life-threatening conditions. Clinicians learn to recognize and respond to the complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity ingrained in critical care medicine practice. On the emergency and critical care rotation, the learner partners with a clinician educator to work through the diagnosis and management of critically ill patients. This is a dynamic, interactive, synergistic, and collective process; a balance of clinical reasoning to care for patients and educational reasoning to teach students/trainees.
Educational strategies:
- Meeting the Learner
a) Orientating the learner (learn about your learner background, interests and previous experiences), b) setting expectations: a reciprocal relationship, c) diagnosing the learner: understand and personalize their experience, d) priming the learner: prepare them for academic success
- Case presentation teaching strategies
- Curtail interruptions, apprise the student of the expected length for presentations beforehand, allow the learner to arrive at the diagnosis themselves, encourage the learner to present in a way that “makes their case”
- Goal is for the oral presentation to be accurate, organized and concise.
- Areas of deliberate practice: organization of presentations, being more concise in presentations, focusing on the key patient-specific elements of a presentation, including more pertinent positives and negatives, better highlighting the key active issues, communicating areas of uncertainty, and modifying presentation based on audience, amount of time, purpose, and specialty.
- One-Minute Preceptor model:
The one-minute preceptor model provides a framework for time-efficient teaching with evidence of positive impacts on learning in the clinical setting.
1) Get commitment, 2) probe for understanding, 3) teach general rules, 4) provide consolidative feedback, 5) provide constructive feedback (Aagard E, Teherani A, Irby DM: Effectiveness of the One-Minute Preceptor Model for Diagnosing the Patient and the Learner: Proof of Concept. Academic Medicine 2004;79(1):42-49.)