Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep" (quote attributed to Albert Camus) All board-certified cardiologists and cardiology residents are both educators and students. Each day that we learn something new we are students. Each day that we help someone learn something new we are educators. Teaching a student something new does not guarantee that it will be learnt effectively. A common example of this is the use of traditional lectures to disseminate information. Traditional lectures involve the passive transfer of information to a (hopefully) receptive audience. A wealth of literature exists supporting that students only retain a minority of information that is presented to them in a lecture and there is little impacton 'deep' learning (Long & Lock 2010). This is at odds with the perceptions of adult educators that information transfer is the most important purpose of lectures (Sutherland & Badger 2004). Nevertheless, traditional lectures remain one of the most common teaching methods in veterinary education, partly because they are an efficient method of delivering information in a content-rich curriculum. In our world in which the amount of biomedical information increases substantially each year, the challenge of delivering large amounts of information in a way that encourages students to retain it is highly relevant for veterinary education. An effective educator needs more than just knowledge of the subject that they teach. An effective educator needs to know how to learn.
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