Model Curricula: Helpful, But Never Sufficient
Abstract
Dr. Borus is Psychiatrist-in-Chief and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at Brigham and Women's/Faulkner Hospitals, and Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Boston. Address reprint requests to Dr. Borus, 75 Francis Street, Boston, MA 02115. e-mail: jborus{at}partners.org Key Words: Model Curricula Commentaries Defined in Webster's as "a course of study, often in a specialized field," (1) a curriculum is a plan for teaching a specific area of knowledge or set of skills. This plan must include a content delineation of the knowledge to be learned or skills to be mastered; it suggests and often contains materials that can be useful in disseminating such knowledge or skills to learners, such as syllabi, slides, reading lists, texts, or particularly illustrative articles and handouts; it provides ideas about methods that have proven most useful in teaching this content or skill area, such as lectures, seminars, tutorials, practica, and supervised clinical experiences; and, finally, it makes recommendations about the priority and order in which this teaching should proceed most effectively to allow integration of the content. A curriculum as a teaching plan is often broken down into particular "lesson plans" that focus on that portion of the curriculum to