Twelve tips for designing curricula that support the development of adaptive expertise

An essential component of expertise is a clinician's ability to adapt to uncertain, complex, or novel situations while maintaining their competence in routine situations. Adaptive expertise provides a framework for understanding and developing experts who have the skills to effectively balance and support these dimensions of work using both procedural and conceptual knowledge. It is important for educators to understand that often the training which fosters adaptive expertise does not require new tools or approaches, but rather a reconceptualization of training using many of the same instruction and assessment formats already available. The twelve tips discussed in this paper showcase ways in which education can be transformed to support the development of adaptive expertise including the significance of instruction that combines various forms for knowledge, the value of productive struggle, and shifting the design of assessments to support learning and performance beyond retention and direct application.