Teaching and Physical Therapy

Teaching is a term I did not expect to encounter when I signed up for Physical Therapy as a course. I did consider it lately but I only restricted my view to the works of our professors.

With our first day in teaching class, our professors let us experience what it feels like to be teachers for our clients. We were exposed to different cases where teaching was never your ordinary teacher-student discussion. It made me realized my weaknesses not just as a future clinician but as a teacher as well. We were also exposed to a Yoga session which allowed us to view an example of how teaching should be done by a therapist. And lastly, and probably the highlight of the experience was the reflection of our video portfolio.

All of these exercises might seem easy but they urged me to reflect if I have the necessary skills to become an effective therapist. It made me wonder if my clients would understand me or if I could even understand myself while teaching a lesson. The exercises also made me reflect on the individual needs of each client and how special the learning experience is for a person. Although our professors told us that we were already doing teaching during our previous subjects, I realized that I’m not teaching anything but just asking the clients to perform things without considering for their own learning experience. I may have successfully done the intervention but I did not teach them how they can help themselves without my presence. With this, I realized that teaching is not just a term I failed to consider but teaching is part of physical therapy.

The next time I encounter such opportunity, I should consider my audience/patients as students and not just passive recipients of therapy.