Governance

I enjoy visiting schools and other educational (postgraduate) training institutes. A Dutch expression says that this allows you to “look into the kitchen”. I am often struck by the lack of governance that many of those programs suffer from.

What is very typical for modern competency-based education is the creation of longitudinal strands in a program. Ideally, these longitudinal strands are constructed in a mindful way. For example, by starting with simpler tasks and later using more complex tasks. Or by creating clear cumulative educational linkages between the tasks across time in a spiral nature. And by smartly linking the longitudinal elements with the module elements. Training programs also often struggle with assessing the longitudinal components. Creating those longitudinal learnings strands is educationally smart, because we know that distributed learning is much more effective than massed learning.

However, a longitudinal approach tends to clash with modular training structures. Conventionally many training programs have a strong modular structuring, and it is very difficult, often impossible, to create longitudinal strands. In many of the educational practices that I have seen, curriculum governance is not strongly developed. And here I note a bit of a paradox. Modern competency-based training programs have the wish to develop complex skills such as collaboration, communication and professionalism. Governance in education would strongly benefit from those skills of our teachers.

But are we teaching our learners something that we as teachers lack? Most of our teachers have not been trained in a competency-based way. We know that PBL graduates are great PBL tutors. So perhaps there is hope that our future staff will be better prepared and I hope this will have an effect curriculum governance. It is interesting to see that our health sciences education literature pays relatively little attention to governance. I think we have lots of interesting educational technology and knowledge, but how to realize and implement that in educational practice remains a big challenge. By the way, I can really recommend you to look in “another kitchen” every once and a while. You will learn a lot. And it is remarkable how fast one can “diagnose” a training program. Often the governance issue needs effective treatment.

Cees van der Vleuten