Curing the Curriculum

Isn’t it weird that we value a second opinion in medicine but this is not really a thing in education? Isn’t it weird that we first collect the data and then treat patients but do it the other way round in teaching?

John Hattie is probably one of the most renowned scientist in the field of education research and still, after many years in the business, keeps being greedy. He developed the most commonly used feedback model in higher education and keeps advertising to focus on the process instead of the achievement.

What characterizes a great teacher? What do students need to learn? Why are high achievers often rewarded and students who put in the effort of working through struggles not? Who’s fault is is actually if a student fails the course?

These are some of the topics we cover in this episode. Although there are more practical tips for teachers and faculty, also as a student this talk might be very interesting in order to become more autonomous in learning and especially choosing the right teachers.

To contact us, get in touch via email: hi[At]curemeded.com & follow us on Instagram @curingthecurriculum

You've asked AI a question you were too embarrassed to ask your supervisor. Handy. But what does it cost when we start routing around the awkward, slow, human business of learning from other humans?

In this episode we talk with Professor Margaret Bearman from Deakin University about AI, bias, and why efficiency might be the most misleading word in education.

We get into the black box problem, and why she thinks the real skill isn't opening it, it's knowing a good output when you see one. We talk about bias: not just in AI, but the fact that data can quietly replace the patient in front of you. And we build on the philosopher Lauren Berlant to argue that teaching and learning are supposed to be inconvenient, and that this is a feature, not a bug.

A conversation about mess, judgement, and why the most useful question a medical student can ask isn't "is this right?" but "how would I know?"

To contact us, get in touch via email: hi[At]curemeded.com & follow us on Instagram @curingthecurriculum

In this conversation with Liz Molloy we cover the paleo case against the feedback sandwich, why emotions in feedback are not a problem to be managed away, how trust is earned one dip of the toe at a time, and why the student who stayed behind to put the blanket back over the patient may be the most valuable person on the ward.

Liz is Pro Vice-Chancellor of Curriculum at the University of Melbourne and has collaborated extensively with Rola Ajjawi, Margaret Bearman, David Boud and David Carless - and her work is all about feedback literacy.

To contact us, get in touch via email: hi[At]curemeded.com & follow us on Instagram @curingthecurriculum

What is clinical courage? How do we push our boundaries without becoming reckless, and how do we grow into it as students and doctors? In this episode we sit down with Professor Lucie Walters, a rural generalist in Mount Gambier, South Australia. She explains clinical courage when your community has nowhere else to turn. Lucie walks us through the mnemonic she and her team built for doing this safely, reframes courage as a community act rather than a cowboy one, and shares some surprising findings about working at the edge of your scope. We also dive into longitudinal integrated clerkships. Instead of speed-dating through specialty blocks, students spend up to a full year in one rural community where, as Lucie puts it, "the curriculum walks through the door." She explains why interleaving beats block rotations, how supervisors turn into lifelong mentors, and why students on LICs report better wellbeing than their hospital-based peers.

To contact us, get in touch via email: hi[At]curemeded.com & follow us on Instagram @curingthecurriculum

Clinical Reasoning is the process every doctor uses to solve medical puzzles. From collecting evidence to connecting the clues and finally identifying the culprit in order to choose the proper way to handle it - basically detective work.

But how do we learn this? Is it just about building up knowledge, becoming the smart genius who can relate all the pieces of the puzzle? Or is it more complex? For sure it remains complex to assess students progress in clinical reasoning in such a way that they don’t loose motivation to continue to grow.

We talked to Ligia Cayres Ribeiro, Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and head of a research group on clinical reasoning and technology-enhanced learning. Ligia explains how to research such an abstract concept, what aspects are important to teach and why Dr. House might not be the diagnostic genius that we think.

To contact us with any reaction, suggestion or other interaction, get in touch via email: hi[At]curemeded.com & follow us on Instagram @curingthecurriculum