What is Your Program's Professionalism Classes Like?

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Hello,

My basic question is... What is your DPT program's professionalism classes like?

In my program, we are given a lot of assignments to further our "professionalism." Below are some examples of our assignments in summary:
  1. Pick one professional behavior you want to work on. Log your progress for 9 weeks. Write a 2-3 page reflection on how you improved, how it is relevant to your future as a PT, and how it went.
  2. You are assigned a different health care professional - nurse, doctor, PA, OT, etc. Research their role, education requirements, job history, and legal requirements. Present this to one another.
  3. Week 1: Learn gait patterns with crutch and walker. Week 2: Create a teaching plan to teach other students. Week 3: Practice presentations. Week 4: Present to one another.
  4. A lot of reflection papers about health care field trips we take to shadow and work with PT's.
  5. I can go on and on, but it is along these lines. This is just a few assignments from the past 2 weeks.
I am only asking you guys because I always thought that this was just a sort of necessary evil in all health care graduate programs, but my friend in medical school just told me that he never has to do any assignments like these. These assignments combined with being in class until 5pm most days makes it difficult to put the time I feel like I need to in the more time-consuming important classes. I want to know if it just my program or if this is the sort of thing that other programs also do.

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Sounds like professional practice to me. Your role while working with a patient is to communicate effectively with patients of varying levels of education, cognition, etc. Ask yourself how effective a therapeutic exercise is if you can not convey its importance or manage to teach and correct your patient on what you would like them to perform. Believe it or not, reflecting on experience is a very difficult thing to do, if done correctly. Anyone can recite what you did or saw, but translating why, how can you improve, and what alternatives were available for differing patients is forcing you to critically think. Those who learned nothing wasted their time and a valuable experience.
 
Ug!! Honestly, I would flip a little about assignments like those. My school does not have anything like that class wise. Of course we integrate professionalism into every class (being on time, class interactions, professional courtesy, being prepared for clinicals) but we do not have specific assignments about them (Ok, aside from 1 day where we covered all of the APTA ethics/professionalism documents and then were tested on that....but it was quick). If there ever was a problem with professionalism, the faculty or other students would address it with the student immediately.

Our curriculum feels pretty intense. I'm not sure anyone would appreciate mundane logging assignments when you feel like you are drowning in 5 other classes that go so fast your head spins. We do have 1 day a semester where we get together with other health fields and do an inter professional afternoon. We usually do a group problem/activity or something like that. But there is no preparation beforehand or assignments after.

I guess I feel like in a graduate program, yes, you should be doing a lot of self reflection. But I question the heavy required inclusion in a curriculum. That said, I'm an older student....so my views may be skewed. But, as the grades in my school are composed of 3-4 tests and 1 project/paper or a practical exam, I might welcome the extra points available! We don't really have anything like that where the points are totally in your control.
 
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I can see some benefit, but for the most part that just sounds like a lot of busy work to me. I'm not sure I would want to be in a program with quite that much "fluff"put into one semester.
 
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We had a professional class at TWU. We were given similar assignments and reflections, but we also got a bunch of other things like working with other health professionals, communication skills, interacting with patients, managing conflict, behavior management, generational differences, etc. I found it to be "mundane" and "busy work" at the time, especially with the rigor of our program, but I now find it very valuable working out in the clinic, dealing with everything you deal with patients and coworkers.

There was a study out there... I don't remember where, but they looked at physicians who were cited for a professionalism issue by the medical board or something. Found that physicians who had more infractions graduated from med schools that didn't have some sort of class specifically for professionalism.
 
OP - I think your school is overdoing it. My program has a few lectures on communications and professionalism, but nothing like what yours does.
 
My basic question is... What is your DPT program's professionalism classes like?

What you are describing is basically how our professionalism classes go. In addition to tedious group assignments, there are often mandatory forum posts about journal articles that people only half read. CAT forms for articles that people only half read. "Active reflection" assignments that turn into weekly writings of drivel for completion credit. Many hours spent talking about multiculturalism where we learn that we should not make generalizations about people (while paradoxically cataloging the various commonalities people from the same ethnic group share).

Occasionally we'll get an area clinician to come in and give a talk with some case studies...these are generally the best parts of the class.

As a career changer who actually was a working, credentialed professional throughout my twenties, I've found this approach to teaching professionalism to be a bit ridiculous. Like trying to teach people how to swim by lecturing on fluid mechanics. People learn how to be a professional by surrounding themselves with high-quality role models engaged in professional activity. But that's just one man's opinion, and I"m intrigued by the reference above to a study of physicians' rates of unprofessionalism depending on education type. I'd be interested to see the study itself.

NuPT: based on this and other posts, it seems like you're struggling with some issues regarding how the academic portion of your program is set up. I went through that kind of turmoil during my first year. Things are better now (only 8 weeks of academics left). But it's something I still deal with almost daily.

I found it helped to actively reorient myself. I had to imagine the perspective of the people in charge and find a way to see them as trying to help me be a better clinician one day--even if I disagreed with their methods.

Some teachers may seem to be showing up for a pay check, some may seem to be showing up for a power trip, some may seem to be there because their body couldn't handle daily clinical practice anymore. But if I let my mind entertain those thoughts for too long, I get myself into a very bad emotional space. Churning through the necessary busy work becomes almost impossible. I exhaust myself, accomplish nothing, and still have to do the work at some point.

I'm getting better at short-circuiting my downward spiral of frustration and attending to the task at hand. This allows me to keep my countenance and my body language cool when I interact with folks who previously would set me terribly on edge. I can deal with each task more quickly, without it becoming personal.

Which, in a weird way, means that all this nonsense has helped me become more professional. Damn.
 
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We have to do these types of "busywork" assignments in my program, too. It used to really drive me crazy, especially because I'm also a non-trad with plenty of professional experience, but now I just do it and move on.

Which, in a weird way, means that all this nonsense has helped me become more professional. Damn.
:lol:
 
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What you are describing is basically how our professionalism classes go. In addition to tedious group assignments, there are often mandatory forum posts about journal articles that people only half read. CAT forms for articles that people only half read. "Active reflection" assignments that turn into weekly writings of drivel for completion credit. Many hours spent talking about multiculturalism where we learn that we should not make generalizations about people (while paradoxically cataloging the various commonalities people from the same ethnic group share).

Occasionally we'll get an area clinician to come in and give a talk with some case studies...these are generally the best parts of the class.

As a career changer who actually was a working, credentialed professional throughout my twenties, I've found this approach to teaching professionalism to be a bit ridiculous. Like trying to teach people how to swim by lecturing on fluid mechanics. People learn how to be a professional by surrounding themselves with high-quality role models engaged in professional activity. But that's just one man's opinion, and I"m intrigued by the reference above to a study of physicians' rates of unprofessionalism depending on education type. I'd be interested to see the study itself.

NuPT: based on this and other posts, it seems like you're struggling with some issues regarding how the academic portion of your program is set up. I went through that kind of turmoil during my first year. Things are better now (only 8 weeks of academics left). But it's something I still deal with almost daily.

I found it helped to actively reorient myself. I had to imagine the perspective of the people in charge and find a way to see them as trying to help me be a better clinician one day--even if I disagreed with their methods.

Some teachers may seem to be showing up for a pay check, some may seem to be showing up for a power trip, some may seem to be there because their body couldn't handle daily clinical practice anymore. But if I let my mind entertain those thoughts for too long, I get myself into a very bad emotional space. Churning through the necessary busy work becomes almost impossible. I exhaust myself, accomplish nothing, and still have to do the work at some point.

I'm getting better at short-circuiting my downward spiral of frustration and attending to the task at hand. This allows me to keep my countenance and my body language cool when I interact with folks who previously would set me terribly on edge. I can deal with each task more quickly, without it becoming personal.

Which, in a weird way, means that all this nonsense has helped me become more professional. Damn.

so you are saying that the act of taking the class is actually the exercise in learning patience rather that the actual information that the class provides that is helping you figuratively count to ten better? :barf::barf:
 
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so you are saying that the act of taking the class is actually the exercise in learning patience rather that the actual information that the class provides that is helping you figuratively count to ten better? :barf::barf:

That's an accurate summary of much it. And there were times when I would literally count to ten. Also we would tend to live blog our thoughts during class on our facebook group. That seemed like a helpful coping mechanism.

This has been an interesting thread to me because I thought that all programs must have classes like this. As though it's an inevitable conclusion to the nature of formalized schooling and whatever CAPTE requirements the course is supposed to satisfy. Maybe that's something I just had to tell myself to get through it.

Now in the sixth semester they brought in a new professor and things have improved quite a bit. But they had the same professor for perhaps a decade with the same complaints being lodged by students semester after semester. Ah....Academia.
 
This has been an interesting thread to me because I thought that all programs must have classes like this.

I believe all programs do have some form of class like this. But the amount of busywork required definitely appears to vary tremendously from program to program.
 
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