Clair Sauer, CVT, joins Dr. Andy Roark to explore how we’re teaching (and could be teaching better) in vet med. In this episode of the Cone of Shame Podcast, they dig into Clair’s unique path from science teacher to veterinary technician educator at the University of Pennsylvania. With a passion for learning theory and hands-on training, Clair shares her thoughts on competency-based education, the strengths and challenges of the distributive model for vet schools, and why clear learning outcomes should drive everything from curriculum design to in-clinic staff training. If you’re curious about the future of veterinary education, technician training, or how to build a stronger teaching culture in your hospital, this conversation will light you up. Let’s get into it!
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ABOUT OUR GUEST
Clair Sauer started her career as a High School Science teacher. After teaching in the USA and Japan over the span of a decade, she earned her MSEd from West Chester University in 2004 . Since then, she has been involved in developing and spreading awareness of inclusive science programs for urban youth and under represented communities. Upon leaving formal teaching, she worked extensively in shelter medicine, animal welfare and public resource management. Working in shelter med led her to pursue her CVT, which she received in 2018 from Harcum College. She is currently enrolled in a Medical Education Masters program to get another MSEd. She loves being a CVT while integrating her education background into her current role in academia. As well as still growing as a tech and becoming more aware of her own neurodivergence, she makes time to stay active in improving education and access to veterinary medicine for all. She has been nominated and recognized for her achievements and leadership, most recently in 2022, receiving the VECCS Steven Haskins Scholarship. She lives in Philadelphia with her 2 Doberman Pinschers and 2 kitties. When she isn’t nerding out about education and vet med, she likes going dancing with other nerds in vet med and riding bikes in the woods.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Andy Roark: Welcome everybody to the Cone of Shame Veterinary podcast. I am your host, Dr. Andy Roark. Guys, I got a fun one today. I am here with Clair Sauer. She is a CVT by training. She is at the University of Penn College of Vet Medicine, and she works in the shelter department over there. Her real passion is in education.
It’s in teaching and learning. She’s got a really cool background. She did a lot of teaching before she came to vet medicine and she brings that with her. And so I wanted to talk to her about kinda what she sees in education, working in the vet school, and then also what potential she sees for better education for technicians.
We talk a little bit about how we can do some, educating maybe more in a more intentional way in the practice. I ask her about the distributive model of training, which is the, it’s the approach that newer vet schools are leaning towards where they have students learning out in the wild as opposed to learning on campus in a teaching hospital.
We talk a bit about that and she’s got some interesting thoughts as well. So anyway, it’s just a cool conversation about that education and growing people and what the future might look like. So anyway, guys, without further ado, let’s get into this episode.
Kelsey Beth Carpenter: This is your show. We’re glad you’re here. We want to help you in your veterinary career. Welcome to the Cone of Shame with Dr. Andy Roark.
Dr. Andy Roark: Welcome to the podcast, Clair Sauer. How are you?
Clair Sauer: I am well, thanks, Andy. How are you?
Dr. Andy Roark: I am really good. I’m so glad to get to sit down with you. This is our first time getting to talk. We just met. My mutual good friend, Tasha McNerney, the original anesthesia nerd was talking to me and she was like, you’ve got to talk to Clair.
She’s doing really, cool stuff around education. And she knows that’s just a, thing that I geek out about is. Where does the next generation of veterinarians and vet technicians come from? How do we grow people? How do we educate ’em? How do we set ’em up for success? And so she discussed about you and I went and pulled your bio and I was looking at your page on LinkedIn and and at your Instagram presence.
And I was like, oh, wow. I do wanna talk to Clair. She’s quite interesting. For those who don’t know you you are a CVT. You have a master’s in education. You are currently working on a master’s in medical education. You are. At the University of Pennsylvania’s College of Vet Medicine, you you are doing, you’re doing training and education there.
Let me let me just stop here for a second and pause. Tell me a little bit about your role at Penn’s College of VetMed.
Clair Sauer: Sure. Right now I am the lead shelter, medicine and mobile unit CVT. So what my job entails is making sure our mobile unit clinics run. They have everything they need and we are covering, I help with our SOP design and instructional design for our students that enter those mobile units. The mobile unit is mostly working with our shelter department and our primary care department.
It functions as a surgical suite. I help run the surgeries that we do on that mobile unit, and I work closely with the shelter med department as well.
Dr. Andy Roark: So one of the concerns that I hear that comes up with vet student training is surgical experience. Like how, so talk to me a little bit more about the program as far as what the experience of the students is. My impression has been that you’re providing something here that lets people get real hands-on experience and actually do surgeries and things like that.
Tell me more about what the student experience is like and then how many students are you able to put through these programs?
Clair Sauer: So with our program, we do two different rotations on our mobile unit. The first is we offer our primary care students from the primary care rotation as a core rotation that the students experience in their clinical time to come on the unit once in their rotation. So they come onto our unit and we host about four students every Tuesday.
So we’re talking probably 12 to 16, maybe 20 students a month from those rotations are gonna come onto our unit. And then we show host a shelter med rotation, which is an elective rotation in the school. And with those, we hold host about four students for, but they come on twice a month. The students we’re taking about, we do about six to eight clinics a month and each of those can host about four students.
And we usually have an intern on there as well. One of our rotating interns.
Dr. Andy Roark: Very nice. I love that you do that. We’re recording this in the Spring and you said it’s kitten season. It’s getting up and going, and so I, I just, I think that stuff is so valuable. It’s one of those wonderful things that it’s good for society, it’s good for the pets, it’s good for the students, and just I love that you do that.
You have a master’s in education, you have a master’s that you’re working on in medical education. Clair, where did your love of teaching come from and how did you start to weave that together after you got your CVT.
Clair Sauer: It starts way back in high school. I was part of a program called Women in Natural Sciences, hosted at the Academy of Natural Sciences here in Philadelphia. It was a program for underprivileged girls to be exposed to different science careers, and through that I was part of their vet like, their veterinary husbandry department. So I got to take care of their animals they use for outreach education and learn all kinds of enrichment and husbandry things with them. I later became a teacher naturalist there, and that kind of just drove me towards being an educator and how much I just love science and I had an affinity for it, especially when it came to environment and behavior and things like that.
I was a high school teacher after that and I loved teaching science. I always had afterschool programs and always had like classroom animals and things. And then I decided to change because of politics, we’ll say change my career outlook. And I ended up working a lot with my first love, animals.
I worked in a physical therapy practice as well as one of the shelters in the area. And it was a big, one of the bigger no, no kill shelters in Philadelphia. And I became one of the managers there. And from there I realized that I was doing a lot of the admin stuff and behavior stuff, but I didn’t really have a grasp of the medicine part. That led me to go to pursue my CVT at Harcum College near Philadelphia here. And the way that I phrased it to them was, what if I taught a class for you and exchange for a class so you don’t have to pay me? You just have to.
Dr. Andy Roark: You did a pro, you did a pro bono swap with tech school?!
Clair Sauer: It wasn’t that detailed, but yeah, I realized that school wasn’t really in the cards for me because of finances and where I was in my life and things, and I wouldn’t be able to make that commitment.
But I was really interested in pursuing the CVT because of the different opportunities it offered from when I was first going to college back in the golden age.
Dr. Andy Roark: So you, you are amazing. one of the pieces of career advice that I’d probably give more than any other, just when people ask me, is to try to figure out what you enjoy and what you’re good at, and try to figure out how to do more of it. And figure out what you don’t enjoy and what you’re not good at and how to do less of that.
And seems like you have consistently tried things and liked parts of them and moved on to other things that were related and liked parts of them, and you’ve really just made this path happen, which is amazing. How did you come into the University of Pennsylvania as College of Event Medicine? What was that progression like?
Clair Sauer: Yeah, so I entered the field at I was working, but it got my certification at 40. you can do new things, I promise. And and I worked for some private specialty hospitals in the area. I did my clinical rotations through my tech school at Penn. So I was familiar with it, but it just wasn’t speaking to me at that time.
In my clinical practice, I really became engaged in ECC and anesthesia. And during Covid I did lots of pickup shifts and my house is very close to Penn, so I started picking up shifts in the er and that led to ICU and other departments in the hospital. And I wasn’t really a good fit at the hospital I was at.
I realized, it’s a great place, but it wasn’t the right time place or the right time for me there. And when I reevaluated myself to say, okay, what job opportunity do I want to follow where, what is making me the most frustrated about where I am right now? And what is something that lightens me and like just sparks that, ignites that spark in me.
And I realized it was the quality of medicine not being compromised and also engaging in learning more in the growth mindset. And so those things I think that Penn really spoke to and my time, there really was. So the respect that, everyone gives each other here is enormous and there’s always potential for learning and growing.
Dr. Andy Roark: When you look at Penn and you look at how sort of young doctors are being educated there, F, what’s good? What do we as a profession do? what do they do at Penn? Just teaching and learning standpoint?
Clair Sauer: One thing I’ve noticed is since they’ve adapted their new curriculum, they’re offering students an earlier kind of step into clinical education. So they’re offering more like competency-based education similar to what human medicine is doing, and they’re just giving their new. Clinicians, one day clinicians firsthand exposure to problem solving, to different I wanna say the trick words, like competencies and entrustable professional activities.
But they’re giving them like the opportunity to do the thinking and apply all the things that they’re learning. So I think that’s an important component of education and what we’re trying to encourage in our new doctors and our techs we’re trying to give them firsthand exposure to all of the parts that come together of what they’re learning.
And I think just learning didactically is a disservice to these folks who are going through these programs because they go out in the world in day one and they don’t really have all of those clinical skills meshed into each other. We’re not looking at just can you make a diagnosis? We’re looking at all of the parts of evaluating the physical exam, every part of it that goes into making that diagnosis, not just the, can you recite this from a textbook?
Dr. Andy Roark: One of the things I’ve been really interested in recently is we’ve got, about a dozen new vet schools that are gonna be coming online, and the vast majority of them are using a distributive model for training students, meaning that they’re gonna have students that are out in clinical practice getting their hands on and some of them don’t have, some of these schools don’t have a teaching hospital.
Some of ’em have a very small teaching hospital that’s meant to carry a small part of the load and then to send students out and things like that. And I have mixed emotions about it. And so I, I think the potential to let students get their get their hands wet in the profession, out in practice.
I think that’s probably really good and I do like that. I wonder a little bit about capacity. If you’ve got 10 new schools that are all using this model and they’ve got a hundred students in each class. I’m like, that’s a lot of students. And where are they all gonna go? What are your take on this, Clair?
So when you look at this and you look at this learning and model, it seems to me like you’re gonna be a pretty big fan of distributive model, but that’s not Penn uses. What do you think?
Clair Sauer: I also have mixed feelings. I read your blog about this too, Andy, and I it was something that I was thinking of a lot ’cause I just had a session with my cohort for my program and we were talking about things like this too. I think that it’s a great way to fill the need that we have in short staffing and being able to have more doctors and more training available. But I think it’s a double-edged sword. We’re sending folks out into clinics that don’t have necessarily a good training model or folks that were trained to be educators or to be in those roles. So we’re I question what kind of structure do those programs have, and that where you’re sending them to a local hospital, I think that’s great.
They’re getting that firsthand exposure, but there may or may not be a standardization to it. So you know, what kind of competencies are they going to fulfill and on what with what rigor? So we have to look at, are the hospitals going to have a standardized protocol that they follow or not?
Are they going to have educators on hand or clinicians from the school that are available to them during their rotations there? And I just am interested about the structure they’re gonna offer. I think it’s a, a nice solution. It’s a solution. It’s an option. I think that we’re just gonna have to wait and see too, to see how it plays out. But I think better preparing these hospitals for teaching is going to be key to this.
Dr. Andy Roark: What would you like to see happening in terms of teaching inside of veterinary hospitals for their own staff? let’s say hypothetically that I’m a huge fan of active learning and hands-on learning and, skill building and things like that. And I want to grow, just say my technicians or, my associate vets, whatever.
And so I’m looking at my own practice and I’m saying, how am I going to grow these people? What does good hands-on training look like? And Clair, let me just open that I know it’s a, there’s not a lot of context around this ask, but what are the things that you see being done in private practice from a teaching, learning, training perspective that you really like?
Clair Sauer: I think that one thing is there’s, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. There’s so many different avenues out there that exist that offer these things in great ways. There’s private companies, there’s consultings firms, there’s lots of CE available. So I think the number one is talking to your staff and seeing what their interests are.
So what do, where do they wanna grow? What do they love? What is their spark? And then finding ways for them to fulfill that spark through CE or through having a pro come in and give some on the floor demonstrations. But you can definitely use what’s already out there to enhance it so you don’t have to buy all this new equipment, send them out to a wet lab somewhere, or just really believe in the staff that you have and grow their experience.
And I think that will offer so much more than trying to do it all yourself.
Dr. Andy Roark: I like that a lot magic wand, if you get your wish. Where do you see the way that we train vet students going in, say, the next five years? So let’s just take Penn for example, and say, magic wand pressed into your hand. You, Clair, get to guide this ship. What are the advances that you would like to see?
So doing the, your in the medical education program that you’re in. What do you see in human medicine that we’re not using? So anyway, I’m meshing those things together, but yeah, give me your wishlist for where you’d like to see training of vet students go.
Clair Sauer: Integrating, if we can integrate techs that as well I think that’s a big component That always is through my program I’m taking now I’m focusing a lot on the vet education, but because I don’t have a lot of exposure to the curriculum design and how the vet school works exactly as a tech here so far I think I wanna speak more on the tech, in the tech world too.
But integrating both of them. So learning as a team and I think increasing breadth of both the vet med education, just making it more of substance that people recognize is a thing that you can be an educator. You can be a clinician that’s been trained to be an educator, and having platforms that are based off of education theories, or not so much like theoretical, but practices that we’ve seen in human medicine and integrating them to what we use in our vet med practices. An example is our curriculums, a lot of the curriculums across the country are now switching to the, have been over the past like five years or so, switching to a competency-based medical education platform. And that is something that we’ve adapted from human med and it’s shown or like really working well or decently in, in the human med.
Realm. So I think it’s nice that we have adapted that and I think again, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We can take examples from MedEd and integrate our worlds a little bit more. I think I saw that happening a lot more during Covid. So why not continue that and see, what they’re working with and what we can adapt from there.
And in the nursing, if you look at the nursing world and our tech worlds maybe. Look at the education and the standardization of education that the nurses have to gain the respect they have and their title protections and things, and use that in our tech world. And I know there’s things in the works right now that are trying to do that for us.
Dr. Andy Roark: Tell me more about that. What do you mean when you say using their credentialing and sort of standardization for education. What does look right now?
Clair Sauer: Right now, as we know in a lot of states we’re working towards making, passing the VTNE, the boards for vet techs and coming from an accredited program, standardized. There are not that many states left that don’t require those things, but it would be nice to then have those accredited programs, operating more standardly. Right now, there’s a lot of really good things happening in the programs that I don’t know all the inner workings of, but having these programs beefed up a little bit so that when I mention that I’m a veterinary technician, people don’t think that I just hold, I restrain and help the doctor with vaccines.
They know what’s involved in that. if you say you’re a human nurse, people know what’s involved in that, providing the education so that people understand what what is encompassing our jobs.
Dr. Andy Roark: Have you looked at all at the curriculum for the mid-level veterinary practitioner, the masters, MLVL in or MLVP in Colorado. at them.
Clair Sauer:I didn’t, I wanna spend more time looking at them, but maybe you can give me some heads up. I. I look at, from what I’ve glanced at I, I look at what are the things that we as professionals are know that a doctor has to do and what we as techs. And I think the line with the, that mid practitioner level becomes fuzzy and the training behind that person become like that role becomes fuzzy too.
Clair Sauer: And I think that there’s a lot of clarification needed for people to feel more secure with that. I think that it’s not something you can like. Just say, okay, Monday they’re gonna start. I think there’s a lot more work that is involved in that and talking to getting a lot more people involved in the conversation.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah. No, I think you’re right. I, was just curious if you had insider thoughts about it. To me, I, look at it and I don’t know what the outcome is supposed to be, so I can’t really evaluate the curriculum. What are they gonna actually do? And then I would like to take that and then go back at the curriculum and say this looks like it matches up.
It’s what I have seen, and again, I’m not an expert on this but kinda what I’ve seen it has seemed a bit light to me in terms of, it’s, a lot of sort online education and a fairly minimal amount of clinical hands-on education. And that may be totally fine to come in and do some very specific skills and things that are targeted and they could a hundred percent build vacuum in, in, in that amount of time, in, in limited areas.
It’s not nearly enough to come in and, and take a lot of general wellness work. like you’re, if this is the one who’s gonna be doing a lot of things, I go, I don’t know that this curriculum, it doesn’t feel beefy enough to me to get people where they need to be if that’s the outcome.
But I just, until we know what the position that they’re being trained for actually is, I don’t know how you really evaluate the education that is being proposed here. So anyway, I was curious if you had more insight than I did.
Clair Sauer: No, I think I have the same feelings, and I think if you look at it from like the human perspective is we don’t allow nurses to be nurse practitioners in the human world until they’ve had an advanced level of education. So if someone just goes through a basic program, at what level, how are we then going to gain respect from the public if we are putting someone into the field to answer their animals’ needs after just a basic amount of education?
And I love how you went back and said, how can we design the curriculum based on the outcomes? So I think that’s something that a lot of people in all of our training for forget is look at your learning objectives. What are, what do you want the outcome to be? And then work backwards from there. And that can go across the board.
Dr. Andy Roark: I think it’s key to education. It’s definitely key in training is I, see that a lot. And again, people have good hearts and they do things for good reasons. And they say yeah, let’s train our staff. And I’ll say, train your staff to do what exactly. And they’re like, I don’t know, just
be better generally. And, I love where your heart is. That’s a really hard way to actually move the needle. And it’s it’s option paralysis really, quick. You’re like, we could train on anything and people go, I no idea. The more targeted we could be and what improvements we wanna make and where we wanna help people learn the better program we can build clear.
Thanks so much for being here. I really appreciate talking to you. I really appreciate you sharing your your thoughts and your experiences. where can people find you online? Where can they follow along with the things that you’re doing?
Clair Sauer: Yeah, sure. I’m on Instagram as the vet tech teacher. I chime in there every so often. It’s less so that I’ve stepped away from my ECC role, but hopefully gonna be picking up in some shelter med and some more vet med ed stuff in the future.
Dr. Andy Roark: Good luck on the rest of your second master’s degree and keep doing what you’re doing. And I just, anyway, I, love having people who are focused on how we grow and train doctors and technicians. So anyway, thanks for what you do guys. Thanks for tuning in. Everybody. Take care of yourselves, gang. We’ll see you later.
Clair Sauer: Bye.
Dr. Andy Roark: That’s what I got guys. Thanks for being here. Thanks to Clair for being here. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d love it if you left me an honest review wherever you get your podcast. It’s kinda how people find the show. It really helps us out. It’s a big, it’s a nice pat on the back for me as well.
Only if you like the episode. If you didn’t like the episode, then maybe don’t leave a review. You can just write your thoughts on a note and put it in a drawer. You know, like when you get I don’t know. When you get a, when you. When someone gives you a sticker that’s really cool, and you’re like, wow, this is cool.
It’s too cool to just stick on something. I’m gonna wait until I find the perfect place. And you put it in drawer and then three years later you find it and the stickiness is all worn off. And just do that with the letter of things that you don’t like about the podcast. Anyway, okay, take care of yourself, everybody.
I’ll see you later.
