Help for every stage of your veterinary career
I am NOT talking about managing sex workers. In 1989, Dr. Brancati published a tongue-in-cheek article in the Journal of the American Medical Association titled “The Art of Pimping”. It is a true classic which I think anyone bound to be a specialist would enjoy. Pimping is the term used when the senior clinician asks
I was a first-year vet student before I even heard of internships. I was maybe a sophomore or junior before I learned about specialties. I recently saw a post on the APVMA Facebook group asking some very basic questions about veterinary medicine. This is probably not necessary for anyone who’s a senior vet student
A year or two ago I was having a conversation with someone who had been an educator for decades. I tossed out a passing reference to Bloom’s Taxonomy and they said, “What’s that?” I was astonished. I consider this to be an extremely foundational principle for any educator to understand and use. Bloom’s Taxonomy is
I was working with a student recently and I gave them some feedback along the lines of, “Please make sure to pay attention to detail and make sure everything is ready for your case.” I could tell, as I was speaking to them, that their eyes were glazing over. I like to think I am
Early in the summer of 2020, I discovered the concept of specifications (or spec) grading. I bought the book, which I reviewed earlier this week. You need to read that book review to understand this post. I decided to apply spec grading to all three classes I was teaching in the fall: a 1-credit Intro
I was reading a news article at the Chronicle of Higher Ed a few weeks ago about remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. There was a throw-away line under a subheading “High-stakes assessments are overrated” about using ungrading or specifications grading. I had never heard of either of these, so followed the links provided about
This post was by request from an experienced clinician who is seeking more tips to improve giving feedback to advanced clinicians-in-training. I don’t really have all the answers, but here are some ideas I hope will help. First, effective feedback has three fundamental requirements: it has to be timely, it has to be specific, and
The intern year is typically one year immediately following graduation from vet school. Some people may go out into practice and then go back to an internship, but that is rare. Some people do an internship to improve their clinical skills or to avoid going into the Real World for another year. The reason many
Well, here we are, going back to school in the midst of a contagious, virulent, very bad pandemic. Just as cases are going up, thousands of students will be interacting with people inside spaces. I don’t know if that’s necessarily bad, but I understand it can be anxiety-inducing. I think my single piece of advice
I acquired Teach Students How to Learn: Strategies You Can Incorporate Into Any Course to Improve Student Metacognition, Study Skills, and Motivation by Saundra Yancy McGuire in a burst of purchasing designed to improve my own pedagogical approach. It was recommended to me by someone I feel is a good educator, and then it sat