Contents
Presenters
Jeong Su Lee – Lecturer Occupational Therapy, City, St Georges, University of London
Poster
I designed four TMH teaching plans, with students engaging in each step: learning from senior students, practising with lectures, working on case scenarios, and teaching 1st-year students. This approach allows active participation in learning and teaching sessions, enhancing their knowledge and clinical reasoning skills in TMH.
Therapeutic manual handling (TMH) is one of the key threshold concepts introduced to first-year OT students. By learning what it means to ‘move and handle unwell patients therapeutically,’ students not only grasp the importance of using correct techniques and appropriate equipment but also understand their responsibilities to demonstrate and teach these practices to others, such as peers and family carers, as part of their professional role. Although TMH is one of the OT signature pedagogies (Shulman, 2005), evidence suggests that final-year OT students demonstrate limited knowledge in TMH and struggle to apply their learning in clinical situations (McGrath et al. 2015). Currently, the City St George OT program offers all four TMH trainings as refresher courses with the same learning outcomes and teaching methods. This means that students’ learning remains passive and misses the opportunities to advance their clinical reasoning skills to the optimal level. Therefore, the ‘Decoding the Disciplines model’ was used to address the learning bottleneck that OT students experience in TMH (Middendorf and Pace, 2004). Expert OTs often consolidate TMH by teaching others. With this concept of actively engaging the students in the teaching session, I designed four TMH steps throughout the three-year OT course.
- 1st session: First-year students learn from third-year students with lecturer supervision (Acquisition, practice, collaboration).
- 2nd session: Students delve deeper into the theories and practice with lecturers (practice).
- 3rd session: Students participate in simulation sessions with scenarios to build critical application skills (investigation, production).
- 4th session: Third-year students teach first-year students, formulating their teaching plans and reflection (collaboration, production, discussion).
In this way, the learning escalates from basic understanding to utilising more complex cognitive and process skills, addressing Laurillard’s six learning types (Laurillard, 2012) and maximising social constructivism in each session. This peer teacher concept can be successfully adopted in other disciplines, especially for mastering hands-on practice.
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Open in new tab References
Clouder, L. (2005) ‘Caring as a ‘threshold concept’: transforming students in higher education into health(care) professionals’, Teaching in Higher Education, 10(4), pp.505-517.
Laurillard, D. (2012) Teaching as a Design Science: Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology. New York: Routledge.
Middendorf, J. and Pace, D., (2004) ‘Decoding the Disciplines: A Model for Helping Students Learn Disciplinary Ways of Thinking’ New Directions for Teaching and Learning, (98), pp.1-12.
McGrath, M., Taaffe, C. and Gallagher, A., (2015). ‘An exploration of knowledge and practice of patient handling among undergraduate occupational therapy students’. Disability and Rehabilitation, 37(25), pp.2375-2381
Shulman, L.S. (2005) ‘Signature Pedagogies in the Professions’ Daedalus, 134(3), pp.52-59.
