The veterinary practice staff is most often a very diverse group of highly committed people. They were trained in a school system that had a bell curve mentality, and many settled for being in the major part of the bell curve.

In veterinary medicine, or any healthcare profession, we do not have that luxury. It is a "go" or "no go" world of curative medicine. Either you have the IV in the vein, or you do not. Either you have re-established an airway in an anesthetic misadventure, or you bury your patient. Either you have stopped the bright red blood from spurting across the room, or your trauma case will exsanguinate and you can bury your mistake. There is no such thing as a partial pregnancy. It is all or nothing!

The practice staff will not make it any easier on the trainer:

Many adults fear learning environments, because of past experiences with:

 Bad memories.

 Lack of confidence.

 Fear of comparisons.

 Social unease.

 Suspicion.

They are not out to get you. They are usually just individuals, who have never had the opportunity for competency-based learning. But then again, most trainers in veterinary practice have never learned how to be effective educators. That is the thesis of this section: understanding who are the learners and how they learn best.

Remember: what we learn with pleasure we never forget.

Emotion and Gender

(Generalities -- Not Guarantees)

The adult educators have determined there are and classified four basic learning preferences in the American population:

 Talkers (emote/relate): This group learns best through sharing, relating, and discussing. They seek attention, like working in groups, and enjoy role playing.

 Thinkers (reflect/relate): This group learns best through logic and fact gathering, want to hear from experts, explore the principles, analyze ideas, theorize, read, and desires the one-on-one time.

 Testers (react/reflect): This group learns through testing and objective assessment of examples. They are problem solvers, seek results, enjoy experimenting, and tinkering.

 Tryers (react/emote): This group learns through impulsive trial and error. It must make sense. They are action-oriented, who decide and apply, connecting ideas, with a need to stay productively active.

Significant learning combines the logical and the intuitive, the intellect and the feelings, the concept and the experience, and the idea and the meaning!

The trainers in a practice should be subject-matter experts, and no one can be a trainer of everything. People are intelligent and gifted in different things. Learners, who start with their own interest areas, seem to learn more effectively. A practice's training coordinator knows who is the best trainer for which subject, ensures that person is recognized in public as the trainer for that subject, and schedules topics into the training plan to support the practice initiatives and mission focus.

The hiring team becomes the training mentors, and mentors ensure the trainers are causing the appropriate learning to occur with the candidate(s) or staff members. A few basic principles span all the learning types:

 Adults learn only when they are ready.

 Adults learn in twenty-minute windows.

 Adults must repeat the learning concept seven times in the twenty-one subsequent days for best retention and integration.

As trainers develop an "effective teaching" lesson plan, they need to think about the learner(s), as well as the subject. When doing one-on-one, it is best if the trainer meets the learner's preferred style. But in groups, trainers must use multiple methods to balance their approach to a diverse group of learners. The following matrix (Figure 4: Trainers Lesson Plan Matrix) allows the trainer to address the different styles of delivery to balance the presentation(s):

Figure 4: Trainers Lesson Plan Matrix

The effective teaching sequence is capture attention (discovery), set up the need, determine competency, ensure teaching/learning, targeted application, evaluation by learning objectives.