Inspired Vet Article - Train a person to fish: Effective CPD

In-Communication’s, Christine, Geoff and Alan have put team-based and individual learning at the centre of their work and this has been with all vet practice team members.  Using well researched, tried and trusted techniques, they are continually updating their owns skills and knowledge and enjoy bringing to life very practical issues facing the profession in the present day.

There is an ancient Chinese proverb that says, “Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day, train a person to fish and you feed them for a lifetime.” The proverb says so much about why continued professional development (CPD) nurtures team members and gives them skills to not only satisfy their own need, but also provides an invaluable service to the practice as a whole. We can understand from research that the investment in CPD brings many rewards:

Staff retention

Client satisfaction

Confidence within the individual

Improved teamwork

The list goes on.

How do we learn?

Educational theorist Neil Fleming introduced the ‘VARK’ model back in 1987 to describe ‘preferred learning modes’ where he identified four ways in which people differ in how they learn:

Visual

Auditory

Reading/Writing

Kinesthetic

From this we can deduce that no person has one learning mode but may be dominant in one or two of these. The challenge for training facilitators working with mixed groups of learners is to help people explore, learn and challenge themselves whatever their preferred learning mode may be.

We have found training in clinical communication skills is heightened when a facilitator is a respected leader of a group of professionals, rather than an expert having all the answers. Practice team members will come with their own skills, experiences and styles that can add to the rich learning a good leader can facilitate. This ‘skills sharing’ approach helps in the cohesiveness of the group and provides greater learning outcomes.

Roger Schwartz is a prominent organisational psychologist and offers this definition of what group facilitation is:

‘Group facilitation is a process in which a person whose selection is acceptable to all members of the group, who is substantively neutral, and who has no substantive decision-making authority, diagnoses and intervenes to help a group improve how it identifies and solves problems and makes decisions to increase the group’s effectiveness.’

Experiential Learning

Over the many years we have been involved in team-based learning, there has been a move in adult education from teaching to learning. Traditionally, ‘teaching’ has been about imparting knowledge by experts to passive learners who absorb information and then put that to the test in the real world.

Over recent times, this has moved to ‘learning’ and specifically, experiential learning. However, the word experiential has taken on wider meanings and for some, encompass most of traditional teaching. At In-Communication, we favour the purist view of experiential learning and even refer to it, at times, as ‘encounter-based learning’.

Keeton and Tate (1978)¹ offered this definition of experiential learning.

‘Learning in which the learner is directly in touch with the realities being studied. It is contrasted with the learner who only reads about, hears about, talks about or writes about these realities but never comes into contact with them as part of the learning process.’

Experiential learning is not:

The writing of new information onto the blank slate of your mind

The act of memorising an immutable bank of knowledge

A passive process that happens to a learner; rather it is an active process that engages them and invites participation

In order to achieve this active process, simulated clients, actors, role-players, call them what you will, are engaged to bring to life challenging situations in safe learning environments. Use of actors is now quite commonplace throughout industry training.

However, we promote the use of what we call ‘specialist clients’. These are role-players with high abilities in character portrayal, and trained knowledge of the communication skills required throughout veterinary practice. They feed back on how the client feels and evidence when that occurred in the interaction as well as offer skills-based knowledge about which proficiencies may have worked differently. From this we can invite the learner to try parts of the consultation again adopting some of these newly acquired ideas to see how they feel in practice.

The leading exponent of experiential learning, David Kolb recognised that we all learn in four styles, depending on the social environment, educational experiences or on the basic cognitive structure of the individual in question. That being said, we all have a fundamental Kolb ‘learning- style’, and it’s interesting to see those learning styles in play during a typical encounter-based training session.

Kolb recognised that people learn differently, and he sets it out thus:

Although we actively encourage participants to have a go, another popular phrase being ‘learn by doing’, we recognise that for some, the act of observing can also be an active learning experience.

So, how can we make that happen?

Here, Kolb also creates for us a learning cycle:

Learners engage at any point in the cycle where they feel most comfortable, but research shows that ‘learning by doing’ reaps the greater learning rewards. After all, you wouldn’t undertake a cruciate repair without having first tried it on a cadaver!

We can try it out in a safe learning environment – feel the experience

We can reflect as a team of learners – reflect on what has been witnessed

We can then think through what might be done differently – conceptualise our thinking

We can try it again using different skills to achieve different outcomes – experiment by doing

Reflecting on the work of Schwartz; within our experiential workshops, held in a convivial atmosphere for high quality learning, we are constantly exploring the different experiences and approaches each group member brings. With the skilled knowledge of the facilitator and simulated ‘specialist’ client, not only do we proffer other techniques, but in line with Kolb, actively try them out and further explore transfer of clinical communications skills practised in the workshop, back into the real world.

CPD is an Investment

CPD is an investment in the individual and should primarily be about raising confidence. Sadly, as budgets tighten, over the years training has been the casualty of savings and cutbacks. Perhaps, however, this should be the time when skilling people to perform their best should be paramount.

It’s true, when looking at the ‘bottom line’ it is not possible to clearly see the cost to income ratio of investment in training. Organisations that recognise the positive impact that high quality training can have on the morale of staff and the benefit to the organisation and clients, will surely thrive more greatly when times return to growth and profitability.

We hope here that we have given plenty of food for thought as to how CPD stretches and unlocks the mind. It sometimes sounds very ‘worthy’ and not much fun, but we can conclude that if learning is not fun, then little is achieved.

In our work, the practice team member meets with simulated clients who, like real clients, have a back story and carry certain emotions. This brings the surprise elements that team members will encounter in real life. It’s how to deal with these surprises, utilising the team member’s personality and adding in some new skills, that keeps the training vibrant and at times challenging. As Dame Sue Black, a forensic anthropologist once said, “You cannot train people for the unexpected, but you can introduce the unexpected into their training”.

Don’t forget to sign up to our monthly newsletter for exclusive content and news from Veterinary Woman!

Inspired Vet Article – Train a person to fish: Effective CPD

How do we learn?

Experiential Learning

CPD is an Investment

Share this: