About the ACT Curriculum

Basecamp sets expectations for professional engagement, prepares learners for success, and contextualizes knowledge of biomedical and social sciences for clinical practice. This six-week phase is intended to provide the basics of dental education for the learner.

Foundations of Practice (FOP) encompasses the first two years of the curriculum, focusing on developing foundational knowledge and skills through integrated experiential learning and early clinical exposure. This phase prepares learners to deliver person-centered care, apply foundational sciences for sound clinical decision-making, and develop essential psychomotor and clinical techniques.

Starting in the spring of their first year, learners join assigned practice groups (‘offices’), working alongside upper-level classmates in patient care. By summer, they receive their first primary provider-patient assignment. In the second year, the curriculum expands to include specialized areas of care, emphasizing the application of clinical skills in patient treatment.

Guided Advanced Clinical Practice (GAP) entails the clinical phase of the curriculum. The goals of GAP are to aid learners as they support person-centered care in clinical practice, refine the use of effective clinical decision-making, and develop advanced psychomotor skills and clinical techniques.

The clinic model replicates both current and future clinical environments, with two main practices housing three vertically integrated offices. Faculty preceptors lead each office, collaborating with specialists to promote care teams. At the end of each six-week block, offices conduct a ‘practice review,’ an element of practice management focused on key parameters essential to effectively managing a dental practice and office operations.

Learners rotate through a variety of intramural specialty-focused rotations. The extramural service rotation, or Dentistry in Service to Community program (DISC), rotating for four weeks throughout diverse and underserved North Carolina communities.

Seminars in the third and fourth years are designed to simulate residency training through hands-on and interactive learning. These include topics such as diagnosis and treatment planning, critical thinking with case-based learning, and specialty seminars. The leadership seminar, in collaboration with the Bell Leadership Institute, provides leadership training during each six-week block, culminating in a focused two-day event in the summer between the third and fourth years.

Individualization allows learners to explore various aspects of dentistry and outside the profession, offering learners experiences with electives, certificates, and special shadowing experiences in multiple areas of dentistry.