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Posts tagged Education.

Anaesthesia and Compounding Marginal Gains

The British Cycling Revolution: A Lesson in Marginal Gains

When Dave Brailsford was appointed Performance Director of British Cycling in 2003, he inherited a program defined by failure. The national team hadn't won Olympic gold since 1908, and no British cyclist had ever claimed victory in the Tour de France's 110-year-long history. The 39-year-old cyclist-turned-performance consultant would transform British cycling and our approach to improvement through an unexpectedly simple philosophy: the aggregation of marginal gains.

Growing up in one of the few English families in North Wales, Brailsford developed a perpetual drive to prove himself. "Somehow I always felt I did not quite fit in," he reflected. "So I always thought I must try harder than the others to be accepted, to be successful." This outsider mentality would fuel his pursuit of excellence.

Read on for how marginal gains relate to anaesthesia...

Threshold concepts: a gateway drug for clinical teaching

I recently learned of something in educational theory that lead me to a small epiphany: threshold concepts.

Critical care specialties are full of threshold concepts.

What is a threshold concept?

The idea of a threshold concept in learning was first introduced by Meyer and Land1, focusing on economics education. They described this as concepts that "...once understood, transform perception of a given subject."

A threshold concept provides a gateway to a greater, more in-depth understanding of an area – but is often difficult to master. Meyer and Land described a threshold concept as having:

"...the notion of transformation (in which students change the way they perceive and practice aspects of their discipline), irreversibility (once learnt rarely forgotten or 'unlearnt'), integrative (whereby connections are made to concepts or knowledge of previously unknown or concealed areas), bounded (in that they help define the boundaries of a subject area) and potentially troublesome." K. Connan (2014)

Read more...


  1. Meyer J H F and Land R 2003 "Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge – Linkages to Ways of Thinking and Practising" in Improving Student Learning – Ten Years On. C.Rust (Ed), OCSLD, Oxford. [ pdf

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