The Campbell Academy Blog (95)

Year Three - The last puzzle piece, part 2

In the first of this series of blogs about our Year Three Implant Course project, I told you about the 'what' of year three.

The general structure of year three includes online discussion and peer-to-peer learning, face-to-face learning at world-class master classes and face-to-face learning at our own level of master classes on specific complex subjects.

But in this blog, I want to tell you about the 'how'.

From teaching hundreds and hundreds of delegates in implant dentistry, we've come to understand that it's not good enough just to spoon-feed information.

Dentists are particularly busy professionals, and if you give them a load of information to consume, they will invariably kick the can down the road and not get to it quickly enough.

What you have to do is create a degree of accountability and urgency, and learning, and that generally comes from peer-to-peer learning.

We've seen this in our business courses with fantastic effect, with the projects that we set and the deadlines that come up against those, but we've also seen this with our year courses.

The way we have moved along our year three course is that we will inject the peer to peer learning with our own complex cases with extreme difficulty and honesty.

We will show you some of what goes wrong in our practice and discuss how we try to fix it.

We will show you some of the stuff that goes wrong in other practices that we're asked to fix, and every so often, we'll show you some of the stuff that's gone great and tell you why we think that's happened.

This aspect of peer-to-peer learning, online discussion in a safe and moderated environment, is one of the best ways I've ever found to learn.

It's not the same as a Facebook group because whatever you put on that group is open for other people to see, some of whom you don't really know and some of whom are liable to criticise what you've done, sending you back under your stone.

That is not how the peer-to-peer learning process works on the Slack groups at The Campbell Academy and in year three.

This is a group of like-minded individuals who are desperately keen to be better and who want to learn from every aspect of what everyone else has to show.

We will drop speakers onto these Slack groups, where you will have access for a month to people who will help you with your cases and who will help you with the cases that we present for you. We will tie this in with discussions about the research and the educational content from the world-class master classes.

Amongst all of this, we'll help you with your photography and the collection of your case presentations so that you can catapult yourself towards achieving the ITI diploma, which I believe will become one of the standard benchmark qualifications in implant dentistry around the world (the ITI occupies prominence in implant dentistry education in 100 countries).

This is not a master's comma; not in any way is this a master's, and you will not be able to put MSc after your name.

This is not a research qualification; it's a practical and intellectual investigation of implant dentistry to allow you to be a better dentist and a better practitioner using all the tools that are available to all of us.

You will also get access to all areas of the clinic to see how we do things, good and bad, honestly and reasonably.

We believe this is one of the most innovative courses that will exist around (our colleagues at the ITI believe that too).

I hope you'll consider it to move yourself to a level of implant dentistry, which will give you more fulfilment and satisfaction.