Instructional Design | 03.23.15

Our activity was to make an instructional design for our fieldwork this week. Our group was assigned to teach core strengthening exercises and aerobic exercises to year 3 PT students. Although the teaching session would be a group activity, the instructional design was to be submitted individually.

As it was my first time to make an instructional design with a specific client in mind, I found it hard to immediately think of ideas and content for the teaching session. I kept on underestimating my client’s skills while making the objectives. Coming up with four objectives took me almost two hours! I think this stresses that as physical therapists, we must have a good clinical eye in evaluating our client’s skills and capabilities. Hopefully, with practice, I will be able to make appropriate objectives for future clients in a shorter time.

It was also hard to choose the specific exercises for the teaching session because I haven’t met any of the clients yet and thus, cannot gauge their physical capabilities. I think that this is one disadvantage of teaching a group – we cannot tell and we don’t have enough time to assess - their individual capabilities. I relied very much on my previous knowledge about them as a group and tailored my teaching plan around that.

Generally, I immensely enjoyed the workshop because I like planning and arranging. However, realistically speaking, there isn’t always time during a therapy session to make an instructional design. I think that I need more practice in order to make an instructional design faster and utilize one during a treatment session. Another consideration in making an instructional design is time management. I had to allocate one hour into my objectives and teaching-learning activities. This is one of the hardest parts because I was just limited to one hour. Even though I wanted to make sure that every objective is given enough time, there was no choice but to sacrifice some of the time to make more for activities that take longer.

In conclusion, I deeply appreciate that we were given an opportunity to make an instructional design with the guidance of the professors. I think that this will be a very practical and useful skill in future practice.