University at Buffalo (UB)
Co-founder of the Harvard Medical School-Cambridge Integrated Clerkship, David Hirsh, MD, speaks at a curriculum conference. He has expertise in areas like educational continuity & medical education transformation.
Meaningful Methods
While our well-established classic curriculum is sound and trusty as ever, we’re committed to developing curriculum for an ever-changing health care landscape.
Our Offices of Medical Education have meticulously designed our Well Beyond curriculum to ensure it trains and inspires exceptional physicians and scientists through transformative education. Here is how:
We are incorporating programmatic assessment into the revised curriculum. This provides opportunities for students to work with Learning Community coaches to identify personal learning goals based on formative and summative assessment data. This also creates new opportunities for incorporating:
- standardized assessments
- additional assessment modalities and approaches
- ways for students to calibrate and analyze their own progress and performance
Additionally, by incorporating progress testing within a programmatic assessment structure, learning communities’ faculty coaches can be aware of students who may benefit from additional support and resources to ensure their success.
Through programmatic assessment across the curriculum, we hope to optimize the learning and decision-making functions of assessment that will best prepare our graduates for future practice.
The official kick-off for the curriculum revision and redesign was the Medical Education Retreat in September of 2019, which featured Alison Whelan, MD, chief academic officer at the American Association of Medical Colleges. Since that time, numerous workshops and retreats have been held with stakeholders including students, faculty, department chairs, deans, administrators, community leaders, hospital administrators, allied health professions faculty, and Graduate School of Education faculty.
These meetings were informative, interactive sessions designed to introduce drivers for medical education reform and discuss newer concepts in medical education. A Guiding Principles workshop allowed senior medical school leadership, faculty, students, residents, and stakeholders to voice their interpretations of our school’s five core values and express how those values translate into guidelines for curriculum development.
At the same time, in 2019, the Medical Education and Educational Research Institute was created and provides infrastructure for faculty development and educational research in support of the curriculum revision efforts.
From there, we made tremendous progress on the curriculum revision and redesign:
Timeline for Curriculum Revision and Redesign
Student success is our top priority. If you’re a faculty member, we know you agree — because when our students succeed, it means health care’s future is in capable hands.
By fostering institutional change and implementing our redesigned curriculum, the Jacobs School is giving students a critical key to success.
But for real change to occur, we need the skills, expertise and enthusiasm you bring to the university every day. Faculty members: Will you be a trailblazer who helps transform UB’s medical education?