Chapter 3: Creating a Clerkship Curriculum

A curriculum is a plan, a path for students to follow, with a beginning, middle, and end. The word curriculum derives from the Latin word for “running. ” Three elements describe the course that the student will run: a set of objectives, learning activities, and assessment of student competency. The objectives set expectations at the beginning of the course; that is, describing what students who “run the course ” will be able to do. The learning activities are essentially the motor for getting from the start to the finish. At the end, the assessment system verifies how well students achieved these objectives. A new clerkship director usually takes over an existing curriculum. The novice director may find that the original design met the needs for the department and the medical school at some point in the past, but the logic supporting that design is now lost. In addition, curricula often grow in piecemeal fashion, with new objectives, activities, and assessment pieces accreting over time. The design of a curriculum given to this new director can be confusing and cumbersome. Though occasionally the director may have the mandate to reconstruct the course from scratch, s/he often needs only to adjust the curriculum by repairing only the least effective parts. Parts of any clerkship curriculum are fairly standard, and may not need much improvement. Th