Overview

Dates:  December 2009-December 2010.

The Student Team Experience in Practice (STEP) Fellowship was part of
efforts of the division’s curriculum redesign. It’s focused on identifying and developing a set of effective, team-based learning activities, clinical performance rubrics, assignments and assessments which integrate didactic and clinical learning.  STEP would ultimately impact 130 first and second year students in six courses and 12-20 classroom faculty, clinical education faculty and clinical adjunct faculty.

From December 2009 to December 2010, CIT  hosted the fellowship program to support seven faculty members at The Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) at Duke School of Medicine. The fellows worked with other classroom faculty and 20 clinical adjunct faculty to apply team based learning approaches as called “Student Team Experience in Practice (STEP)” to six courses that would comprise the first and second years of the clinical education component.  The goal of their new clinical education sequence was to  standardize the learning experience and integrate team-based education into the clinical practice setting.

Dr. Kyle Covington, the DPT fellowship leader commented, “The CIT Faculty Fellowship has been a valuable opportunity for our faculty to work together to implement a large curricular change with input from experts across campus and our profession. This program has aided our ability to think and act broadly as we have formed an innovative and integrative curricular sequence for our doctoral students.”

Fellows Activities

Fellows attended a one-day orientation in December 2009 which included reflection of a CIT sponsored TBL presentation and workshop event that they had attended; discussions of  DPT STEPs (their team-based learning model) and its role in their curriculum; and discussions of collaborative learning strategies related to STEPs activities. Together with CIT staff, fellows went over Blackboard features thoroughly focused on managing content, using class wikis, group’s and individual’s blogs, and discussion boards to enhance collaboration and communication between classroom learning and clinical training. During the orientation day, they also collaboratively added and edited “The Year Ahead Schedule” and the Fellows Profiles wiki site.

The fellows had used a Blackboard course site as a library/repository to store and collect standard teaching materials, assignments and rubrics across courses that eventually deployed  to regular course sties and shared with all faculty and clinicians. In addition, they used another regular Blackboard course site to create some collaborative learning activities, to experiment with the Blackboard’s Peer and Self Assessment feature. On this course site they all had both “instructor” and “student” roles with separate accounts to experience both instructor and student perspectives. Also they tried to use a Duke WordPress site as a database of their Planned Learning Experiences (PLEX) Repository for faculty and clinicians to access to utilize with students in the clinic; as well as for clinicians to upload their own “Experiences”.

Fellows met monthly and received a stipend of $1,000 for active participation in meetings and the completion of all agreed upon Fellowship activities.

Outcomes

Through the fellows program within one year, fellows were able to

  • Gain knowledge in teaching methodology, pedagogical theory and assessment strategies to help train the clinical adjunct faculty
  • Identify and develop a set of effective, team-based learning activities, assignments and assessments which integrate didactic and clinical learning
  • Formulate a Clinical Performance Rubrics
  • Develop guidelines to create standard learning modules

Participants

Kyle Covington, PT, DPT, NCS – Assistant Professor
Corrie Odom, PT, DPT – Assistant Professor
Jan Gwyer, PT, PhD – Professor
Carol Figuers, PT, EdD – Associate Professor
Elizabeth Ross, PT, DPT –  Assistant Consulting Professor
Jennifer Moody, PT, DPT  – Clinical Associate
Daniel Erb, PT, PhD – Associate Professor