The Teaching Academy of the Consortium of West Region Colleges of Veterinary Medicine

In January 2014, the Faculty Development Working Group (FDWG) identified the goals of the initiative, to design and implement a faculty development program for new-to-teaching faculty.

A needs-assessment survey was sent to faculty at RTA member institutions and a program was then developed to foster a culture of evidence-based best practices in teaching by providing professional development in:

• Principles of teaching and learning
• Outcomes and student assessment
• Approaches to student-teacher interactions

The FDWG set out to develop educational modules that could benefit all faculty, but were designed to benefit early career faculty; these modules could then be used as a part of a full program or as stand-alone sessions (one or more modules) for faculty development. The faculty development program was designed based on the findings of Steinert et al. (2016) who identified key features of effective faculty development programs including, “evidence-informed educational design, relevant content, experiential learning, feedback and reflection, educational projects, intentional community building, longitudinal program design, and institutional support”.

The initial program, called the Veterinary Educator Teaching and Scholarship (VETS) program, was designed to cover a breadth of pedagogical topics using an interactive and experiential approach.