I just wanted to share a thought while preparing our case notes for the Applied Physiotherapy module we’re developing. One of the designers made a note of the “guideline answers” for facilitators to some of the questions that we might use to trigger students’ thinking. I wrote the following as a comment and didn’t want to lose it when the document is finalised, so I’m putting it here.
“I think we should make sure that, in addition to the ‘answers’, we should identify the main concepts we want students to understand. Remember that we’re using our paper patient (i.e. the case) as a framework for students to learn about concepts. Then, they apply those concepts in the real world to patients. They reflect on those real-world interactions and identify dissonance between their experienced reality (the patient contact) and their abstract conceptions of reality (how they originally conceived of the patient contact). After the patient contact, they feed back to their small groups and facilitators, who together help students create new relationships between concepts. So, in short, the clinical concepts are learned initially through the paper patient, tested in the real world with an actual patient, discussed online (maybe) and then brought back to the classroom for further reflection and refinement. The next week they are exposed to new concepts that build on their previous experiences, and then they get to test those abstractions in the real world again.”
I’m trying to take an intentional approach to using Laurillard’s conception of academic learning that I’m exploring in “Rethinking University Teaching”