Nutrition counseling is often not effective, I and one obstacle may be the quality of the patient education being offered. Specifically, many dietitians have not had formal instruction in teaching, and many do not routinely employ teaching skills known to enhance instructional effectiveness.3•4 There have been calls for teaching skills training for nutritionists, and many health professionals desire such instruction.4.5 Unfortunately, it has not been widely available or accessible. This article reports an evaluation of a course on skills for teaching patients when it was translated from the institution where it was developed to another academic setting. The course "Effective Patient Teaching" (EPT) has been offered both as an elective to health professions students and as a continuing education course for health professionals.79 Course time (30 hours) is equally divided between facultyled lecture-discussions and four to five videotaped "microteaching"IO exercises in which classmates serve as surrogate patients, and participants are able to practice 20 selected teaching skills (Table 1) and receive feedback on their effectiveness. The individual items form four subgroups. For example, Interpersonal Skills help build trust and rapport. Essential Teaching Functions are general strategies that should form a framework for most teaching. Presentation Skills help make instruction memorable (i.e., they improve efficiency). Finally, Adherence Promotion Skills are used to improve the likelihood that patients will apply what they learn. Evaluations show that EPT improves the patient teaching skills of undergraduate medical and nursing students8• and practicing health professionals. II •12 EPT may prove a helpful response to the need for teaching skills instruction for undergraduate nutrition stu