Day 8: Tayo'y Magsayawan!

25^th of March, Year 2015. I was excitingly nervous as I was up early in the morning because our group was the first among many students who would become teachers for the fieldwork. We were assigned to conduct a wellness activity for adult clients who had CVA. At first, we thought we will be the only ones who would teach the clients but we were told that we will be conducting the activity with the CTS-AA interns. Our tasks include conducting the warm up, a dance and the cool down activities. We were also tasked to provide proper and appropriate guarding for clients with balance problems and to organize the environment while doing crowd control.

One of the most important things a physical therapist must achieve is to establish rapport with the clients. I think we were able to win our clients’ trust even if there were still instances that both parties seemed shy in communicating with one another. CTS-AA clients are truly very cooperative and very friendly. They were the ones who actually made the wellness activity fun and interesting. Knowing your clients probably has to be the first thing you should do because what you will be doing is not for you, but for them. I realized this because even though they are members of the same population and organization, they are different from each other. It is actually their uniqueness that makes your therapy sessions different from one another. This was actually one of the main problems that the group had experienced because we do not know any of them prior to the activity so we were just relying on the few information that we got about them. But we managed and we were able to do it because of the clients, they were the ones who inspired us to perform effectively during the wellness class.

I think one of the strong points of the wellness class is that the clients became motivated to complete the activities, so I think we were able to achieve an affective objective, even if we did not included one in our consolidated instructional design. I was really happy when we were asking for feedback on the activities. As the teacher who led the dance, I really felt fulfilled because we were affirmed that everyone enjoyed the dance. We actually danced twice. However, we could have provided more feedback during the activities because we were too preoccupied in dancing with them that we forgot to become facilitators of learning. I also had a hard time in finding the line between communicating professionally with the clients and communicating with them while trying to make the session enjoyable.

As teachers, I think we were able to achieve the basic competencies we are expected of but we must still be reminded of the importance of preparing and planning your teaching, knowing your clients, targeting appropriate objectives, providing rationale, providing enough and appropriate feedback, and providing motivations for the clients to do exercises for the benefits that they would gain. And as learners, I think we were able to become oriented to some of the things that interns do. I was amazed on how natural and easy it seemed for them conducting such an activity. In all honesty, it is not just a simple aerobic dance class because there are a lot of things happening in a single class. 

Overall, the experience was very humbling. I experienced a lot of things which I were just imagining before. I get to experience handling actual clients, guarding them, teaching them, learning with them, talking to them, listening to their stories, laughing with them, and dancing with them even if we were only together with them for a limited time. But most importantly, I was reminded of why I want to be a physical therapist.

Teaching in Physical Therapy provided everybody the chance to prove to themselves that they are or they will be good at what they will be doing in the future and the chance to improve. Thank you for the two weeks of learning teaching.