• Family Medicine

In response to Hashim and Zou:

We appreciate the thoughtful read of our article1 ‘Curriculum development: a how to primer’ and the commentaries about this topic by Drs Hashim and Zou. We thank Dr Hashim for bringing to light another specific type of teaching style, called here a mini-workshop, using some of the theory of the flipped classroom, which is ever more present in medical education. We validate that many aspects of medical education benefit from some hands-on practice, with pre-learning to be done either independently or as a group before the skill-based learning can take place. This would fit nicely with many other modalities one might consider during ‘step 4: selecting teaching/educational strategies’ as articulated in our primer ‘one should match the learner, teacher and material to one or more of the available teaching formats.’1

Dr Zou’s commentary reaches a bit further into the medical education research realm, which might or might not be a part of curriculum development. We felt this primer was intended to speak most directly to the development and implementation of a curriculum, with a nod towards evaluation, rather than representing a commentary on medical education research. We agree that there is certainly a need for more rigorous medical education research and discussion about methodology is important, but beyond the scope of our primer.