Kendal teaches in the Diagnostic Medical Sonography program in the Allied Health area of Health and Human Services. Like the Sonography program, Kendal is pretty new to Canada (moving up here from the United States in 2021) and to Camosun (becoming a term faculty member in the brand new Sonography program in January 2022), but she has obviously made an impact on her students as she was one of 28 faculty members who received a Teacher Recognition Award, this year.
Kendal has been a cardiac sonographer since 2015. “I’ve worked with a very wide patient population from premature babies in incubators all the way up to 100-year-old folks. I’ve worked in trauma centers, hospitals, outpatient clinics, cardiologist’s offices, and I’ve also done traveling ultrasound.” But in addition to being new to Canada and Camosun, Kendal was also new to formal teaching when she started working in the Sonography program.
When I asked how that initial experience was, Kendal told me that “it was a bit of trial by fire, and not just for me. As a new program, everyone was trying to figure things out.” Sonography has only been a program at Camosun since May 2021, with accreditation being approved in January 2023 (the program received the highest possible accreditation result for a new program without graduates.) It is a cohort-based program with 16 students per cohort and 7 faculty members, meaning that the Sonography group is like a family. “We get to be really close and build strong relationships with our students as a result of that.  We have a good teacher to student ratio.” Students are full-time in the two-year program, taking roughly five courses per term. There are currently no options for part-time, “because we ideally need even numbers as our students are practicing their scanning on one another. When someone is missing, labs can become challenging because if one of the rooms has three students, they have to split that same amount of scanning time between three people now instead of two.” But the program group does recognize that they need to find ways to help students who struggle to finish within the two-year time frame. “I don’t know what the answer is, but we realize we need to decide what to do if not everybody finishes on time. So far we have not faced that as a newly established program.”
One of the things Kendal is most excited about is the Sonography program’s integrated school clinic where real patients come for scans run by students with preceptors who are Island Health employees. “In my second term at Camosun I was a clinical liaison, meaning I would drive out to Victoria General Hospital and Royal Jubilee Hospital to check on the students there. Because the clinics were removed from the on-campus environment, you couldn’t see the direct communication between students understanding the conceptual knowledge between their didactic learning, their lab learning, and the clinical environment. Now, because the clinic is right downstairs, we have a closer relationship with those preceptors than the ones who were out in the hospitals. Unfortunately, our clinic didn’t open until the first cohort were out in practicum.” Not every hospital experience is positive, but the on-campus clinic is different. “Anybody who’s applied to be a preceptor in the on-campus clinic loves teaching – they wouldn’t have applied for the job otherwise. You have the people who are passionate about ultrasound, about health care, patient care, and also about teaching the next generation of sonographers. This also makes the instructor’s life a lot easier with that synchronicity between what’s going on in the classroom, what’s going on in the lab, and what’s going on in the clinical environment.”
I asked Kendal about her experience coming into the program after courses have returned to an in-person model, after the first year being wrapped up in COVID restrictions. “Because sonography is hands-on, my fellow faculty found the ultrasound lab hard to manage. We have a large TV in a classroom hooked into the ultrasound machines in each of the individual rooms. Instructors can watch what the students are doing on the machine. But, because one of the restrictions during COVID was a two people only per room requirement – meaning the student and the patient – how do you as an instructor guide the students to rotate the probe, apply more pressure, etc.? I cannot imagine how difficult that was for them. I came on board when restrictions were lifted on that.” Today, while the labs are back in person, some of the courses remain blended or asynchronous. Kendal, however, much prefers teaching in person. “In an asynchronous classroom I feel like you lose the connection you can have with students face-to-face– they can’t ask questions immediately and directly. And in person is much more fun!”
I asked Kendal what she loves best about teaching. “I love it when you see the students finally understand what you’re talking about, that little light bulb moment. In a hands-on field like ultrasound, you teach content in the classroom, then you’re go into the ultrasound lab where they apply that didactic learning. It’s even more exciting seeing those connections made when they apply their learning in the clinical world. I tell them that I celebrate all their wins where ever we find them, big or small.”
There have been some challenges along the way for Kendal and the program. “We had to do a lot of content creation because there was nothing there for the majority of these courses.  Even after teaching a course once, there is a lot of retooling to be done for the next time around as we figure out what works and what doesn’t work.” Kendal is also the only term employee in the program which, of course, “comes with its own set of challenges balancing workload: trying to be there for the students as much as they need, and at the same time not burning yourself out. Being a new program and going through accreditation was also very tough, although our program leader did an excellent job preparing us for accreditation.”
One of the things students noted when they nominated Kendal for the Teacher Recognition Awards was her games. “My specialty is cardiac ultrasound. We teach them the basic cardiac ultrasound views – what the expectations of hemodynamics/pressures are, what happens when things go wrong inside of the heart. Lots of content that is very complex and overwhelming! So, what I try to do is integrate some fun activities in the classroom. For example, I made a 12-pound batch of playdough in different colours and distributed it to the students during one of their first cardiac anatomy and physiology lectures. This allowed them to make their own model of the heart. As I presented new ultrasound views (in ultrasound, we’re looking at a 3D structure in a 2D plane and sometimes the anatomy doesn’t look exactly like what you’d expect it to look like) they used the playdough to give them a better perspective of how the valves open, the orientation of the heart, etc. in a 3D view.” Kendal also leverages the technology available in the CHW building as much as possible.  “I use the four projectors in the classrooms to project ultrasound views on each screen. Students break up into teams and draw out how blood moves through the heart. I keep integrating things like that to try and keep them interested because the courses can be very overwhelming. Everyone learns differently and I try to add techniques in for those who need a hands-on connection to knowledge in the classroom.”
Kendal told me that the moments from her teaching that stand out to her were “anytime they tell me, for example, that they scanned their first echocardiogram all by themselves – something that they couldn’t do before. Or telling me about an interesting case that they got to see. Moments where they feel proud of themselves for accomplishing something and want to share that with me. That makes me feel privileged and honoured, to be somebody on their list that they want to share that moment with.”
As our conversation drew to a close, I asked Kendal, based on her recent experience of being a brand-new faculty member at Camosun, what advice she would give new faculty members. As a new and term faculty, Kendal had to learn the admin side of Camosun on top of teaching for the first time, teaching in a new program where she was developing new content, learning to use D2L, etc. and she advises “be patient with yourself and don’t expect to get everything correct right out of the gate. Be willing to advocate for yourself because sometimes people assume that you know specific information or someone else has explained what you need to do your job. Be humble and understand that you’re learning. It can be frustrating, especially when you move from having a level of proficiency in your chosen field to something where you’re a novice again. Just give yourself grace so you can absorb all this knowledge that’s coming at you from so many different directions, in the same way your students are trying to absorb all that new information from you.”