Blog #5 -  March 14, 2017

As part of the CEEP curriculum, my colleague and I were asked to make a site visit to the Bitove academy, an initiative that uses art, social activities, and exercise programs to keep adults with mild to moderate dementia engaged. We were given the assignment of determine whether the site was a worthwhile experience for medical students to be involved with and decide to what degree our level of involvement should be. This involved creating learning objectives and describing potential ways students could be evaluated if this were integrated into our curriculum.

I thought this activity was an effective exercise and gave us some insight of what it might take to design curricula. Entering our debrief session with Dr. DP having been given time to reflect on our visit was useful. It gave me the opportunity to organize my thoughts, but more importantly, gain insight from an expert who has had experience with curriculum design. I learned that part of this process involves conducting different types of needs assessment and that we should ultimately be considering how much this activity would enhance our learning as a medical student. During our discussion I found myself admitting that while a visit to the Bitove Academy would be beneficial with more structure and organization, extending the experience may not add value as I did find myself losing engagement towards the end of my visit. I appreciated how open and receptive Dr. DP was to our feedback and liked how thought-provoking the questions were.

Together, we also discussed how this experience could be explored further and expanded by our peers. As one of the first students to engage in this activity, I think it is certainly worthwhile especially for students who have a strong interest in medical education. The skills that we learned from this small assignment will hopefully be useful for when we (one day) become educators who are involved in making similar decisions about curriculum design.

- CY