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 be learned or mastered in a particular period of time through a specific set of interactions between teacher and learners. Model curricula are such teaching plans put together by groups of experts who are well known for their knowledge of the content area to be covered and/or their expertise in the skills to be mastered.

A model curriculum can be helpful: First, it can provide direction about what has worked for others in effectively teaching this content elsewhere and serve as a "road map" of how to order the teaching materials. Second, it can prioritize content and provide accurate, up-to-date information for use by teachers who are not experts in a particular area to use in their teaching. Third, it can provide focused teaching materials, for example, slides linked to a particular lecture outline or reading assignment, so that on-site teachers do not have to "invent" everything themselves.

Because they are designed and often promoted by experts, model curricula at times are improperly seen as "the way" that everyone should teach a particular subject and may be intimidating to others who wish to teach the material differently. However, as in any teaching endeavor, it is always up to the teacher to personally master the area, divide it into digestible lesson plans, and tailor materials to the needs of his or her actual learners; there is no "one size fits all" curriculum, and poor teaching occurs when the same material and the same teaching process are used with learners who have different needs—simply because a curriculum was designed by "the experts." Model curricula, as a resource, can help define what students need to learn, but each teacher must adapt the materials and procedures of the model curriculum to best fit his/her teaching style and the particular student's learning needs. As all good teachers know, learning is most likely to occur when there is such a "good fit," so that the knowledge or skills offered are taken in by the learners, worked through, and integrated with their previous learning (+2).

Over the years, I have been both a producer and consumer of model curricula. In the late 1970s, I reported the results of an AADPRT work group of residency directors who developed a model curriculum for teaching administrative issues to psychiatry residents (+3). I have also described my own curriculum for the Transition to Practice Seminar (+4) and a program for teaching residents to teach (+5), both of which have been adopted by other training programs. The template of my Transition to Practice Seminar is now used in a large number of psychiatry residencies in this country and in some non-psychiatric residencies, as well; however, in conjointly teaching about this seminar at national meetings with other educators who have used it in their own departments, it has been interesting to see how they have adapted my template to meet the specific needs of their senior residents and the realities of the local practice environment that their graduates will soon be entering.

I've also used others' model curricula in my own teaching. In preparing a recent lecture to primary care physicians about recognizing and treating depression in medical practice, I consulted several curricula on this topic prepared by psychopharmacology experts for pharmaceutical companies. As a non-expert in psychopharmacology, I found some of the materials in these curricula very helpful; however, I could neither just "lift" the lecture outlines from the detailed drug company syllabi nor use their slides in the way they were presented in these outlines. Instead, I drew on the experts' materials to design my own lecture and mixed their slides with some of my own to make sure that the presentation was aimed correctly for the primary care practitioners I was to address and was compatible with my personal style of teaching. If I had tried to force my teaching into the lecture outline and slide package of one of the model curricula, I would not have been an effective teacher for my audience.

A frequent problem with model curricula is that the experts stuff them with excessive information, including the latest cutting-edge research, but often leave out some more basic material that non-experts need to learn first if they are ever going to approach the cutting edge. Most model curricula are over-inclusive for the audiences to whom they are most likely to be taught and therefore must be pared down by a judicious teacher and tailored so that they will meet the learners where they are. For example, although ostensibly aimed at practicing primary care physicians, the model curricula on depression I used in constructing my recent lecture contained excessive detail about the intricacies of the sponsoring pharmaceutical companies' medications, far beyond the interest or ability of a primary care practitioner audience to absorb.

In sum, model curricula can be one important resource for a skillful teacher to draw upon in developing his or her own curriculum and individual lesson plans to teach a particular set of learners. However, model curricula are helpful, but never sufficient; effective teaching always requires a committed teacher taking the time to master, simplify, and properly aim each lesson so that it is most likely to be integrated by the targeted learners.