Pedagogy

One of my biggest problems with vet school is that our professors have little, or no, pedagogical training. So, while they’re by and large brilliant, interesting, nice people… a lot of them are terrible teachers. Either they don’t get how to organize a lecture, or they don’t do a good job of conveying the information they want us to know, or they’ll say things like “just do the clinically relevant stuff!” while as 2nd years we don’t have the experience yet to determine what’s relevant and what’s not, or they’ll not be any good at writing questions that evaluate what we learned.

Recently in our infectious disease class, the professor said “I’m terrible at writing test questions!”He’s known this for quite some time, and received many complaints about, but as far as I can tell, he hasn’t done anything to change it. I know that writing good questions is hard, but a big part of teaching is being able to write evaluations that accurately reflect how well the students learned!