June 10, 2009, by Teaching at Nottingham
Giving feedback on practical sessions via a podcast
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Sarah Westwater-Wood: “In the Therapeutics Studies module I teach three groups the same thing every week and they’re two hour long lectures and it’s quite intensive delivery of manual skills and underpinning knowledge. When I finish the week’s practical sessions I realise that there are common things that I want to feed back but the opportunity is missed. What I also find was that individually students were coming to me to ask for feedback and I was repeating.
“Today’s session is the final of four on the topic of proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation.
“I will deliver it as though it were an assessment and so my questioning will touch on underpinning knowledge as well as the specific technique.”
Practical class
Student in practical class: “So what I’m going to do, is I’m going to stretch your leg backwards, and try and get a bit of extra stretch. Okay. Now, what I’d like to do to encourage this…”
Sarah questioning student: “You said the target muscle was … how is it working?”
Student: “Well, we’re doing a contract and relax, so stretching it first so we put the hip in extension. Then when we get the contraction, so we’re then contracting the hip flexors…”
Creating the podcast
Sarah in her office: “This is the podcast for Therapeutic Studies practical sessions week commencing November 28th. In it you will find feedback on the proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation session and your mock exam technique.
“Key areas that you need to get some more depth of knowledge are in the physiology of inflammation, in the physiology of pain and the competing neural signals at the dorsal horn element for ascending and opiate descending mechanisms. Also you need to revise your bone healing which you will find in your MSD&D notes from year one.
“Sometimes you were a little patchy on the pathology between the osteoarthritis, Osgood-Schlatter’s and maybe thinking what in the patient’s scenario would confirm something of that nature or what would refute it?
“To maximise your marks you need to think about the actual treatment technique and I would refer you to our lecture at the beginning of the sessions where we talked about the approaches such as rhythmical stabilisation, overflow, slow reversals and repeated contractions. You need to have a clear idea of why you would select any one of these approaches over and above another.”
Response to the podcasts
Lucy Bellamy, student: “I think ours were about 5 or 6 minutes long, which is just enough to listen to in one go, and it was more kind of like handy hints to where you could improve any further reading that you needed to do and any work that you needed to do further in your own time to practise more things.”
Samuel Walker, student: “I like the way the feedback was put in because sometimes you don’t have a session, you don’t know how its gone, what’s it been like; it was good to get some feedback and to say “well, yes this is what went well, this didn’t go well”, and it was encouraging to get that sort of support there as well.”
Lucy: “Yes, I think it brought it all together at the end of the week as well because sometimes you go home and you’ve had so much to take in that you kind of forget about certain things and it just brings it all together and summarises it for you.”
Samuel: “I think definitely good for pointers, to know where to go, if it’s at the end of the week as well you know what to look at for the next week that’s coming as well, you know what to read before the next session, that can be quite helpful.”
Lucy: “I did revisit them for revision at the end of the last module that they were used on. I think they were definitely helpful for revising just to pick up on everything that we had done and then look at any further reading that was mentioned in them.”
Sarah: “They need to have lots of feedback on their manual handling skills, they need lots of feedback on pre-reading for sessions, revision for sessions and they also need encouragement for what they did well and where they might focus their revision activities. So it’s both for support and encouragement or motivation as well.”
Sarah Westwater-Wood, Lucy Bellamy and Samuel Walker (School of Nursing, Midwifery & Physiotherapy), .
Sarah is teaching physiotherapy students on a second year module on Therapeutic Studies 1 (B92365). Practical classes take place at the City Hospital. Produced June 2009.
This video was originally published as part of PESL’s Teaching at Nottingham collection.
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