Category: Physiotherapy

Navigating the WordPress Reader interface for PHT402

Jul 18, 2013

in Ethics, pht402, Physiotherapy, Social media, Technology

commenting, ethics course, liking, online course, open course, pht402, reblogging, wordpress

This post is is for the #pht402 Professional Ethics course participants who are using WordPress Reader. Hi everyone. For those of you who are using WordPress Reader to follow the posts of other participants, I thought I’d annotate the Reader interface to highlight the components that you might find useful when it comes to interacting…
PHT402: Empathy and professional practice

Jul 17, 2013

in Curriculum, Ethics, pht402, Physiotherapy, Social media

caring, empathy, pht402, professional ethics, professional practice, relationships, sharing

This is my first post for the #pht402 professional ethics course that I’m participating in for the next few weeks. The topic for the first week is to explore personal objectives related to empathy and professional practice in the health care context. I’ve been teaching the Professional Ethics course at UWC for five years and…
Design principles for clinical reasoning

Jan 14, 2013

in Physiotherapy, Research, Social media, Technology

blended learning, capability, clinical education, clinical reasoning, critical thinking, design, design research, learning spaces, online learning, phd, physiotherapy education, principles, research

Clinical reasoning is hard to do, and even harder to facilitate in novice practitioners who lack the experience and patterns of thinking that enable them to establish conceptual relationships that are often non-trivial. Experienced clinicians have developed, over many years and many patients, a set of thinking patterns that influence the clinical decisions they make,…
Skills we want our students to have

Jan 8, 2013

in Learning, Physiotherapy, Research, Technology

physiotherapy, reasoning, skills, technology, thinking

This post was inspired in part by this article on the 10 skills that every student should learn. These are some of the skills that we’re intentionally trying to help our students develop, as a way of integrating them into the culture of professional clinical practice. Reading carefully. If you can read you can learn…
Ranking students, or developing understanding?

Dec 7, 2012

in Education, Learning, Physiotherapy, Teaching

grades, learning, marks, ranking, tutorials, understanding

We have a collection of courses at my institution that have become known as “killer courses”. These are the courses with a history of poor student performance in terms of throughput and retention, and which we’re trying to provide extra support for. Two of these killer courses are outside courses (i.e. outside of our department)…
Objectifying students in the same way we objectify patients

Dec 3, 2012

in Curriculum, Education, Ethics, Physiotherapy

compliance, emotion, objectivity

What is it about the way we teach that sets up behaviours in our students for the way that they practice? I noticed that many of our students don’t consciously think of their patients as fully human beings. I don’t think it’s intentional, or that they’re disrespecting the patients…they just don’t think of them as…
Exposing the culture of professional practice

Nov 27, 2012

in Curriculum, Physiotherapy

becoming, belief systems, community, culture, language, norms, profession, social networks, values

I often forget that learning is not only mediated by social relationships, but by cultural relationships as well. To a large degree we are the products of influence that emerge from interactions between thousands of variables within our families, groups of friends, communities, religions and countries. The process of becoming a physiotherapist is also embedded within…
Content isn’t important, relative to thinking

Jul 2, 2012

in Assessment, Curriculum, Physiotherapy, Students, Teaching

case-based learning, cbl, clinical reasoning, content, knowledge, thinking

I just had a brief conversation with a colleague on the nature of the teaching method we’re using in my department. Earlier this year we shifted from a methodology premised on lectures, to the use of case-based learning. I’ve been saying for a while that content is not important, but I’ve realised that I haven’t…
Blended learning in clinical education

Jun 4, 2012

in Education, PhD, Physiotherapy, Research

blended learning, clinical education, phd, research, teaching and learning

Later today I’m presenting a progress report on my PhD, at the UWC “Innovations in Teaching and Learning” colloquium. Here is the presentation: Blended learning in clinical education View more presentations from Michael Rowe.
Results of the first round of my Delphi study

Apr 4, 2012

in PhD, Physiotherapy, Research

article, Delphi, research, wordle, writing

I’m away on a 3 day writing retreat where I’m trying to put together a full draft of the Delphi study that I’m busy wrapping up. I thought I’d take a break from writing and do something different (from writing, I mean). I took the full text of the open-ended responses from the first round…
Bring your own device

Mar 9, 2012

in Learning, Physiotherapy, Research, Social media, Students, Teaching, Technology

bring your own device, byod, empower, information management, power, self-directed learning

For the past 2 months we’ve been operating under a bring–your–own–device (BYOD) policy in one of the modules I’m co-ordinating. Actually, it’s the module that I’m evaluating for my PhD, and the BYOD policy is just one component of a completely restructured approach to the curriculum. Some background: Physiotherapy students work to solve clinical problems…
Developing compassion and empathy as part of a Professional Ethics module

Jan 31, 2012

in Ethics, Health, Physiotherapy, Students

caring, compassion, courage, empathy, healthcare professional, personal development, professional development, shame, TED, tedx, virtue

I’ve been spending some time this week working with our 4th year students in the Professional Ethics module. One of our biggest challenges is that our students (and most other students in healthcare programmes) see characteristics like compassion, empathy, courage, shame, and emotional response as something that they need to “have”, like a stethoscope or…
Workshop on facilitation techniques using the Conversational Framework

Jan 20, 2012

in Learning, PhD, Physiotherapy, Research, Teaching

adaptive, clinical education, conversational framework, discursive, facilitation, interactive, laurillard, phd, reflection, reflective, research, rethinking university teaching

How do we get students to think more deeply about learning in an academic context? I’m giving a workshop later today. The idea is that we’ll get all of the facilitators who’ll be working on the module we’re designing (and which I’m evaluating for my PhD) and help them get a grip on the approach…
Challenging students’ conceptual relationships in clinical education

Jan 13, 2012

in Assessment, Education, PhD, Physiotherapy, Teaching

academic learning, applied physiotherapy, clinical education, clinical learning, concept mapping, conceptual relationships, conversational framework, laurillard, phd, pht203, research, rethinking university teaching

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…
Using the Community of Inquiry in online learning environments

Jan 12, 2012

in Learning, PhD, Physiotherapy, Research, Social media, Teaching

cognitive presence, collaboration, communication, community of inquiry, discourse, experiential learning, groupwork, knowledge construction, kolb, online learning, peer evaluation, reflection, self-assessment, social networks, social presence, teaching presence, zone of proximal development

I’m in the process of putting together a workshop for the facilitators of one of our modules that we’re restructuring in order to use a blended learning approach. Here are the notes that I’ve been putting together on the Community of Inquiry (CoI) for the workshop. Bear in mind that these notes are my attempt…
From “designing teaching” to “evaluating learning”

Jan 10, 2012

in Learning, PhD, Physiotherapy, Research, Teaching

case-based learning, cbl, clinical practice, conversational framework, knowledge, laurillard, learning, phd, physiotherapy, research, rethinking university teaching, teaching, understanding

Later this month we’ll be implementing a blended approach to teaching and learning in one module in our physiotherapy department. This was to form the main part of my research project, looking at the use of technology enhanced teaching and learning in clinical education. The idea was that I’d look at the process of developing…
Using a rubric for a blogging assignment

Jan 3, 2012

in Assessment, Education, Ethics, Physiotherapy, Social media, Technology

assignment, blogging, grading, reflection, rubric

Earlier this year I gave my 3rd year students an assignment in which they needed to write a reflective blog post based on a clinical experience they’d experienced. I just thought I’d share the rubric I used to grade the assignments, as I’ve come across a few people have have had difficulty trying to assign…
Developing research and scholarship in our department

Dec 6, 2011

in Physiotherapy, Research, Writing

faculty development, proposals, research, writing

I often speak to colleagues who seem surprised when I describe our departmental structure to develop capacity among our staff members. I thought I’d make a few notes here as an example of what I see as a system that works quite well(for us anyway). My university has an Institutional Operational Plan (IOP), which includes…
Teaching and learning workshop at Mont Fleur

Nov 28, 2011

in Assessment, Learning, Physiotherapy, Students, Teaching, Workshop

applied physiotherapy, assessment, clinical education, concept mapping, conceptual relationships, content, curriculum development, evaluation, feedback, graduate attibutes, healthcare education, intended learning outcomes, learning, learning outcomes, module development, mont fleur, organising knowledge, peer evaluation, phd, physiotherapy, research, rubrics, scientific method, self-assessment, solo taxonomy, stellenbosch, structured observation of learning outcomes, teaching, teaching activity, teaching and learning, workshop

A few weeks ago I spent 3 days at Mont Fleur near Stellenbosch, on a teaching and learning retreat. Next year we’re going to be restructuring 2 of our modules as part of a curriculum review, and I’ll be studying the process as part of my PhD. That part of the project will also form…
Developing case studies for holistic clinical education

Nov 23, 2011

in Assessment, Curriculum, Education, PhD, Physiotherapy, Research, Teaching, Technology, Workshop

case-based learning, cbl, curricular alignment, curriculum, curriculum development, delphi study, document analysis, phd, research, survey, systematic review

This is quite a long post. Basically I’ve been trying to situate my current research into a larger curriculum development project and this post is just a reflection of my progress so far. It’s probably going to have big gaps and be unclear in sections. I’m OK with that. Earlier this week our department had…