Abstract
Clinical practice is complex, requiring practitioners to interpret adiverse range of inter-related variables in order to make clinical decisions as part ofpatient management. This process is often intuitive and therefore hidden from studentsand less experienced clinicians, making the cognitive processes that inform clinicaldecision-making difficult to learn. In addition, educators still emphasise the learningof knowledge and skills through didactic teaching methods, such as lectures, in whichstudents are passive “recipients” of knowledge. Unless physiotherapy educators designactivities that aim to induct students into the professional culture and help them todevelop ways of thinking and being that go beyond knowledge and skills, our studentswill continue to struggle with clinical reasoning.In this position paper, we argue that the careful integration of technology as an adjunct to traditional lectures can be usedto facilitate discussion and interaction as a way of developing practice knowledge in students. This leads to higher cognitivefunctioning as it provides the means by which learners construct their own personally meaningful understanding of the worldthrough interaction with others. The promise of technology in physiotherapy education lies in its ability to create transformativelearning experiences through enhanced communication that is mediated by more experienced teachers or peers. If technology isused to enhance the learning environment by providing richer and more meaningful platforms for communication and discussion,it may have a role to play in the social construction of knowledge as part of contextualised learning spaces.
Highlights
Clinical practice is complex, partly because practitioners must review and re-prioritise patient problems in a process of active interpretation and the management of multiple dynamic and inter-related variables (Higgs, Richardson and Dahlgren 2004)
If lectures are not effective for developing higher order cognitive skills like clinical reasoning and problemsolving, what is? The aim of this paper is to argue that the lecture as a method of teaching in physiotherapy education may not lead to the effective development of the higher order thinking patterns that are necessary for effective clinical practice
We suggest that the integration of technology into the classroom be used as an adjunct to traditional lectures to facilitate dis cussion and interaction as a means of developing practice knowledge
Summary
Partly because practitioners must review and re-prioritise patient problems in a process of active interpretation and the management of multiple dynamic and inter-related variables (Higgs, Richardson and Dahlgren 2004). Even though the past few decades have seen a change in our understanding of how learning happens, healthcare educators continue to emphasise the transmission of content in lectures as their preferred method of teaching (Graffam 2007). One of the main reasons that lectures are ineffective when it comes to changing students’ ways of thinking is that information usually flows in one direction, from the lecturer to the class. This does not allow for the discussion that we know is important for learning (Laurillard 2012). If “teaching is about moving minds” to develop independent thinkers who will not bend to the will of teachers (Laurillard 2012 p. 5), the predominant method of teaching in the healthcare professions should change
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