TEACHING STUDENTS TO THINK

My experience as a college professor was probably not unique as experiences go in the world of education. I taught professional students as sophomores and then as juniors in two colleges of veterinary medicine. Most students had five years or more of college experience by the time they entered my class; many held college degrees. Because of the competition to enter the curriculum, veterinary students are unique in as much as they are the cream of the crop. In addition, they have a fixed curriculum, which means they have very little choice of which classes they can take.  The point is that they are mature and intelligent; thus, a unique group. It is also a point that they are almost 100% vocational students, meaning they are there to learn how to do a specific job to become veterinary practitioners.

My job was to teach them how to apply physiological chemistry to the diagnosis of disease. They had fulfilled perquisite course in chemistry and statistic, for example. Against that background, there is a little talked about aspect of being a college professor. College professors have little or no training as teachers. They go through a PhD program or a clinical residency and then dropped into a classroom: shocking but true.  My first years of teaching were a disaster.  The students did not like the sophomore class but loved the junior class. Then something changed, they started to enjoy the sophomore class and worked harder then they did in other classes. This post is about why student attitudes changed.

The sophomore calls was a essentially a litany of tests with an explanation of what each test measured (blood, urine, cerebral spinal fluid, etc), the chemistry of the test, what could go right with it and what could go wrong with it, including the predictability of the test result. By all standards, it was dry, dull, uninteresting but important for their careers. The usual student complaints were that they were veterinary students, they wanted to learn what veterinarians do, and memorizing lists of tests and diseases was not what they had seen veterinarians do. Then the junior year happened. The curriculum had exposed them to lectures in medicine and surgery as well as clinical diagnostic challenges. My class involved rotation of small groups of students 6 to 10. We would set for two weeks in a small classroom I had lined the walls with blackboards. I provided the students with written instructions ahead of time; they were to prepare difficult cases and present the chosen cases to the group with the idea of defending or refuting the diagnosis. The species could be any animal species they chose.  They would write all laboratory results on the black board along with notes on case history, etc. I would sit in the back of the class and listen. The presenter and the others could have any textbook or reference papers they chose. I refused to correct or comment while the student was presenting and discussing the case. After the presentation and discussion, I would openly critic the discussion. We could cover 12 to 15 cases per two-week class. I could evaluate the students according to their participation both as presenter and as discussant. No place before or after in their career would they be subjected to such an intense cluster of varied and difficult cases.

I learned many things about what I had taught them as sophomores.  In addition, they would do literature searches and find information I had missed. It was a great learning experience for me and added tremendous value to my sophomore lecture notes and lecture techniques. What turned out to be a surprise is that the juniors talked to the incoming sophomores, as a result their attitude changed after the first few years. I even had a student stand admonish a classmates for talking when I was lecturing, “Shut-up, we have to know this stuff”, he angrily declared.

One of my favorite quotes about education is Maya Angelou’s, “If you learn teach.”   I was especially proud of by career choice of teaching verse- the more lucrative practicing of veterinary medicine after I learned that a student couldn’t discuss a case if they had nothing to discuss but so did the student learn that same thing. Veterinary medicine is what is going on in the head of the practitioner and not what you see him do. In that context, I often think about the teacher who says their objective is to teach students how to think and not how to memorize; what do their students think about? How to think is different than thinking. If you don’t have anything to think about you can always be a philosopher.    

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