Vast amounts of knowledge, skills and competencies needs to be taught to the undergraduate medical students. This poses a challenge for faculty given the restrictions, requirements and requests for form and content. Faculty members at the Department of Geriatric Medicine encountered the challenge: how do we efficiently convey a complex area of knowledge within a setting with several requirements, restrictions and requests?
Methods We propose a template for a problem based learning model paralleling the spiral structure for organising undergraduate medical educational programs and incorporate learning principles known from experiential learning theory resulting in the small-scale spiral structure for medical education (S4ME). We suggest implementation of this model within the context of a learning environment for medical students in clinical clerkship seeing patients regularly.
Discussion The S4ME supports learning by applying principles from experiential learning theory. Furthermore, the spiral construction revisits topics at increasing levels of complexity by each iteration, thereby adding new learning and supporting retention of what has already been learned. The students are inclined to focus on content rather than structure when learning is based on a familiar structure.
Conclusion We hypothesise that the use of “small-scale spiral structure for medical education” is a supportive tool for the challenge of teaching vast amounts of knowledge, skills and competencies to the undergraduate medical student given the set restrictions, requirements and requests for form and content.

Small-scale spiral structure for organizing PBL case sessions in medical domains

[Conference proceedings](https://vbn.aau.dk/en/publications/transforming-pbl-through-hybrid-learning-models-timely-challenges)