Teaching Vet Med Like It’s 2025: Why 2010's methods don’t belong (#392)

Vet school lectures are seldom attended by Gen Zers, who prefer to learn via digital platforms in their own time

Fifteen years ago, I taught like many of my contemporaries: long didactic lectures, heroic hours, and an unspoken expectation that devotion was measured in how late you stayed.

That approach is misaligned, and frankly inappropriate, for the current generation of veterinary learners and for the realities of practice today.

Today’s learners aren’t less committed.

They’re responding to a profession and a world that have fundamentally changed.

Veterinary medicine is no longer a cozy mom-and-pop industry. It’s a diversified, corporatized landscape where trust is earned, expectations must be explicit, and boundaries matter.

What Changed and Why It Matters in the Classroom and Clinic

• The contract era arrived. Students and new graduates expect clarity (learning objectives, assessment rubrics, duty hours, pay for after-hours work on rotations). That’s not entitlement. It’s adaptation to a world where institutions are larger, ownership can change overnight, and informal understandings can disadvantage early-career clinicians.

• Work–life boundaries are health-care safety features. Tired, overextended trainees make more mistakes. Modeling sustainable schedules and honoring stated hours are part of our patient-safety duty, not a concession.

• Trust is built, not assumed. Learners have seen how even reputable employers can miss the mark. They will (and should) ask direct questions about expectations, feedback, and fairness. Our job is to answer without defensiveness.

  
  

Why My Old Style No Longer Works

• Fire-hose lectures ≠ learning. Passive, marathon sessions reward stamina, not mastery. Today’s students need spaced, active, case-anchored practice that transfers to real cases at 2 a.m.

• Socratic gotchas kill psychological safety. The teach by pressure culture suppresses questions, the very oxygen of clinical reasoning.

• Glorifying overwork contradicts what we preach. We can’t teach evidence-based medicine while ignoring the evidence on fatigue, burnout, and error.

• Vagueness breeds inequity. Unclear expectations advantage insiders. Transparency levels the field.

  
  

What Today’s Learners Need

• Clarity up front

• Publish rotation contracts including competencies, procedures, scope of practice, assessment criteria, duty hours, and escalation paths.

• Start each block with a one-page How to succeed in this rotation guide.

• Active learning over passive time

• Flip the classroom: pre-work micro-lectures (≤10 min), in-person time for cases, simulations, and decision-making drills.

• Weekly clinical reasoning sprints: brief, structured cases with differential lists, next-best test, and management plans, then, rapid debriefs.

• Psychological safety as a skill

• Replace cold-calling with directed think-pair-share and write-first prompts.

• Use feed-forward feedback: On the next cat with dyspnea, try X and listen for Y.

• Competency-based assessment

• Map activities to clear milestones and entrustable professional activities (EPAs).

• Grade the decision process (history focus, prioritization, risk/benefit), not just the final answer.

• Coaching, not hazing

• Short, frequent coaching notes (Two strengths, one next step).

• Normalize time-outs: We’re stopping here because this is where errors creep in.

• Boundaries modeled by faculty

• Honor posted hours; if extra work is truly educationally essential, schedule it in advance and compensate/credit accordingly.

• Protect sleep before on-call. Tired brains don’t learn.

• Tools this generation uses

• Allow responsible use of clinical decision aids and AI for literature triage; assess judgment in how they’re used.

• Structured note templates and checklists to reduce cognitive load and surface reasoning.

• Inclusion and access

• Provide multi-modal materials (text, audio, annotated slides).

• Make accommodations routine, not exceptional.

  
  

Strategies to Think About for Generation Z

• Expectation setting on day 1

• Here’s what you’ll be able to do by Friday, how we’ll practice it, and how I’ll assess it. If I drift into ambiguity, call me on it.

• Feedback frame

• Two things you did well, and one thing to try differently on your next case, and a resource to help you practice that change.

• Boundary modeling

• We end at 6. If clinical needs push us past that, we’ll trade time tomorrow or document credit. Learning doesn’t require martyrdom.

Rick’s Commentary

When we teach for the world our graduates enter, and not the one we remember from 15 years ago, engagement rises, errors fall, and graduates leave with durable judgment, not just memorized facts.

Generation Z hasn’t changed the purpose of veterinary education.

They’ve reminded us to align our methods with reality.

Teaching methods in 2010 produced hard-working survivors.

Teaching in 2025 demands capable, reflective clinicians who can think clearly, collaborate kindly, and set boundaries that keep patients and teams safe.

Updating our teaching isn’t capitulation.

It’s stewardship of the profession.

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