Art and Evidence-Based Teaching to Promote Knowledge Acquisition and Student Engagement in a Hybrid Course
Purpose: Physical therapy education includes acquisition of foundational knowledge as well as demonstration of clinical proficiency of skills and behaviors. Through hybrid classroom instruction, we can maximize our time spent together focusing on evidence-based active teaching practices that support clinical based skills while students spend time outside of the classroom gaining knowledge based skills.
Methods/Description: The teaching technique utilized in this doctor of physical therapy pathophysiology course has evolved from a large lecture format with medical students, nursing students, and dental students to a hybrid flipped classroom focused on clinical application of pathology for physical therapists. Active learning techniques have been shown to promote knowledge retention, deeper understanding, student engagement, and faculty engagement. Structure has been found to be instrumental in the success of distance or hybrid classes. The design of this course involved flipping the classroom such that students were tasked with identifying and understanding specified components in weekly pathology topics, lower order skills, outside the classroom. Collaboratively, small groups would create a visual representation of the content focusing on images with minimal words. Faculty moderators would present a patient case to the group, often via video conferencing, to illustrate the pathology clinically and further the discussion surrounding the weekly topic. Students then met face to face in new reorganized groups to participate in a technique called jigsaw teaching. In this approach learners become experts in a content area and then teach their peers. The visual notes served as a teaching plan. To progress along Bloom’s taxonomy of skills, the students then worked collaboratively on a patient case with faculty support. These face to face sessions focused on higher order thinking skills of application through evaluation.
This class structure allowed faculty to spend their time on higher level skills and engage in more clinically relevant discussion than if the class time involved traditional lecture and knowledge translation. Students were able to work at the level of knowledge acquisition independently.
The format selected for creating their teaching plan involved the use of visual note-taking, also called student generated drawing, sketch-noting, graphic visualization, or content mapping. Visual note-taking focuses on images but can be combined with words. A picture is, after all, worth a thousand words. We know that learning style is a myth, but that learning occurs by actively engaging to manipulate content. We also know that the physical act of writing or drawing increases comprehension and retention over typing or highlighting. Images are also more memorable facilitating retrieval of information.
Collaborative learning has been shown as an effective tool to increase knowledge. When peers teach each other they are more deeply engaged and reach a greater depth of comprehension due to accountability.
Results/Outcomes: Course feedback completed by faculty moderating small groups largely supported the use of this hybrid method for maximizing faculty-student interactions. They reported being able to begin discussions at a deeper level when compared to the traditional lecture style course. They also noticed greater student engagement and comprehension of the material during small group interactions. Their own increased engagement was apparent in their ability to spend more class time discussing clinical applications and reviewing patient cases. Student feedback was also supportive of the hybrid course structure. They enjoyed the collaborative learning and teaching as well as the clinical application. Students demonstrated hesitancy in sharing their hand-sketched notes and often preferred to utilize web-based images despite much encouragement. Those students also reported spending excess time on formatting.
Conclusions/Relevance to the conference theme: A structured hybrid classroom model when combined with evidence-based teaching practices can be more engaging for both faculty and students than a traditional lecture based class. In future quarters, hand drawn sketches will be required for teaching plans.