Margaret PlackGeorge Washington University | GW · Doctor of Physical Therapy Program
Margaret Plack
PT, DPT, EdD
About
58
Publications
90,136
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Introduction
Margaret Plack currently teaches in the Doctor of Physical Therapy Program in the Department of Health, Human Function and Rehabilitation Sciences at The George Washington University. Margaret's research is related to Adult Education, Reflective Practice, Educational Theory and Teaching Methods. Her most recent publication is 'Systems Thinking and Systems-Based Practice Across the Health Professions: An Inquiry Into Definitions, Teaching Practices, and Assessment.'
Additional affiliations
January 2005 - present
Publications
Publications (58)
Introduction
Physical therapist education is rigorous and challenging and reports of mental health concerns in college-aged students continue to rise.
Review of Literature
Although the association between student mental health and behavioral characteristics has garnered interest, few researchers have examined the relationship across educational pr...
Introduction. Anxiety, depression, and burnout are being discussed across health professions. Despite rising concern, studies investigating stress in students enrolled in Doctor of Physical Therapy (DPT) programs remain limited. Only recently have studies exploring stress in DPT students surfaced with any consistency. In this study, our aim was to...
Introduction:
Little is known about the nature of standardized patient (SP) identity and its formation. Understanding identity and formation can have important implications for recruiting, working with, and retaining SPs. Social relational theory explains how identity is formed in a social context in relationship with others. In keeping with socia...
This monograph can be found at: http://proxygw.wrlc.org/login?url=https://hsrc.himmelfarb.gwu.edu/educational_resources_teaching/1/
Background:
A recent survey found that 84% of physical therapist, physical therapist assistant, and student respondents experienced inappropriate patient sexual behavior (IPSB) over their careers and 47% over the prior 12 months. Prevalence data justify consideration of how to address IPSB.
Objective:
The objective was to determine how physical...
Introduction:
The GW-Gold Humanistic Mentor Development Program addresses the challenge faced by medical schools to educate faculty to prepare students for humanistic practice. Grounded in Branch's Teaching Professional and Humanistic Values model, the program prepares interprofessional faculty mentoring teams in humanistic communities of practice...
Approach:
Twenty-six educators from seven different degree programs across the five professions were interviewed and program descriptions and relevant course syllabi were reviewed. Qualitative analysis was iterative and incorporated inductive and deductive methods as well as a constant comparison of units of data to identify patterns and themes....
Background:
For health care providers in the United States, the risk for nonfatal violence in the workplace is 16 times greater than that for other workers. Inappropriate patient sexual behavior (IPSB) is directed at clinicians, staff, or other patients and may include leering, sexual remarks, deliberate touching, indecent exposure, and sexual ass...
Problem:
Educators face many challenges in teaching professionalism. Despite attempts to define professionalism, it remains abstract for students and often not fully appreciated until they are in clinic. Without a way to make it personally relevant, students will likely be less motivated to learn.
Intervention:
We used student-generated word clo...
Background:
SPs have been shown to be a reliable and valid means to assess medical students' clinical skills in clinical skills examinations. We noticed, however, that SPs often express "off the record" concerns about students, which they do not include on traditional assessment forms.
Approach:
To explore these "off the record" concerns, we des...
Purpose:
Teamwork has become an integral part of health care delivery. Such emphasis on teamwork has generated the need to systematically measure and improve the learning and performance of health care teams. The purpose of this study was to develop a comprehensive assessment instrument, the Interprofessional Education and Practice Inventory (IPEP...
Time and space constraints, large class sizes, competition for clinical internships, and geographic separation between classroom and clinical rotations for student interaction with peers and faculty pose challenges for health professions educational programs. This article presents a model for effectively incorporating technology to overcome these c...
This article discusses a learning partnership among faculty and students to influence reflective practice in a blended course. Faculty redesigned a traditional face-to-face (FTF) introductory physician assistant course into a blended course to promote increased reflection and higher order thinking. Early student reflective writing suggested a need...
Purpose
– This paper aims to explore the impact leadership development program graduates had on their workgroup, the nature of that impact and how that impact occurred.
Design/methodology/approach
– This research was conducted at three sites using a qualitative interview methodology with thematic data analysis. Techniques to ensure trustworthiness...
A great deal of debate has surrounded the newest professional (entry-level) degree in physical therapy, the Doctorate of Physical Therapy (DPT). This article provides a historical view of the evolution of physical therapy education from its earliest technical roots to the current status it holds within academia. Political, social, and economic fact...
Purpose:
Faculty development programs have been criticized for their limited assessment methods, focused only on the learners and limited to satisfaction measures or self-reported behavior changes. Assessment of organizational impact is lacking. This study explored the impact of faculty education fellowship graduates on their organization and how...
Reflection is a widely accepted element of adult learning, but it is often difficult to encourage student engagement, and is challenging for faculty to assess. Effective use of reflection in teaching requires faculty to identify the purpose to be achieved; determine the nature and timing of the refection that will best advance learning; motivate st...
Background:
Pharmacogenomics (PGx) plays a critical role in personalized medicine; however, most healthcare practitioners lack the training and confidence in PGx required to fully utilize its potential. Although continuing education and inclusion of PGx into the professional curricula will begin to address this deficiency, PGx education at the sec...
Background and Purpose: The proportion of time physical therapists spend with individuals over 65 continues to grow as the population grays. Education programs must respond to this demand by preparing graduates to meet the complex needs of older persons within the productivity constraints of the current health care environment. This paper describes...
Few avenues exist to familiarize students with careers as clinician-educators, and the clinician-educator career pathway has not been well defined. In this article, the authors describe how they integrated a career-oriented student track into the 2011 Northeast Group on Educational Affairs (NEGEA) annual retreat to introduce students to careers in...
Purpose:
To describe the frequency, type, and perceived effectiveness of physical therapy interventions for children with Friedreich ataxia (FA); identify barriers to therapy; and solicit advice from parents.
Method:
Parents of 30 children with FA participated in semistructured interviews. Qualitative and quantitative methods were used to analyz...
This study used executive coaching and simulation to enhance interprofessional teamwork by promoting collaboration and leadership capacity in health professional students attending undergraduate programs. A mixed methods approach to program evaluation was used. A statistically significant (p<0.05) increase was noted pre- and post-program on the Tea...
Residents-as-teachers (RATs) programs have been shown to improve trainees' teaching skills, yet these decline over time.
We adapted a commercial Web-based system to maintain resident teaching skills through reflection and deliberate practice and assessed the system's ability to (1) prevent deterioration of resident teaching skills and (2) provide i...
Emergency medicine residents are expected to master 6 competencies that include clinical and leadership skills. To date, studies have focused primarily on teaching strategies, for example, what attending physicians should do to help residents learn. Residents' own contributions to the learning process remain largely unexplored. The purpose of this...
Action learning (AL) facilitates reflection, critical thinking, and learning while solving real-world problems. Virtual AL is an asynchronous collaborative process that encourages students to analyze their critical incidents and learn from these experiences. The researchers sought to: 1) determine whether medical students engaged in peer-facilitate...
Pharmacogenomic biomarkers are becoming increasingly common in medicine and drug development. However, there is a genuine concern that the healthcare workforce will be ill-equipped to translate this information to clinical practice. As a result, a major effort is underway to educate future healthcare professionals on pharmacogenomics. This paper de...
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to understand how, when, and why emergency medicine residents learn while working in the chaotic environment of a hospital emergency room.
Design/methodology/approach
This research used a qualitative interview methodology with thematic data analysis that was verified with the entire population of learners.
Fin...
Reflection enables learners to analyze their experiences and capture the wisdom that lies within. Effective teaching requires reliable methods of assessment. Several methods of assessing reflective writing have been described; however, they often require significant training, and reliability has seldom been assessed. This study was designed to dete...
Little evidence exists to support the value of reflection in the clinical setting.
To determine whether reflecting and revisiting the "patient" during a standardized patient (SP) examination improves junior medical students' performance and to analyze students' perceptions of its value.
Students completed a six-encounter clinical skills examination...
Reflection is widely accepted as a tool for learning in higher education. It has been addressed in some areas of medical education but not in the pediatric literature.1–8 It is considered essential to professional practice. Reflection allows for the interconnections between observations, past experiences, and judgment to come to the fore in clinica...
Reflection is widely accepted as a learning tool and is considered integral to professional practice. Journal writing is advocated in facilitating reflection, yet little is written about how to assess reflection in journals. The purpose of this study was to develop and test a method of assessing the elements of reflection in journals and to determi...
Human nature is a very complex phenomenon. In physical therapy this complexity is enhanced by the need to understand the intersection between the art and science of human behavior and patient care. A paradigm is a set of basic beliefs that represent a worldview, defines the nature of the world and the individual's place in it, and helps to determin...
Questions
Questions (5)
After completing some research on systems thinking across various medical and health professions education programs, colleagues and I decided to develop a monograph to help educators teach and assess systems thinking. We have found it a bit more challenging to publish a monograph as opposed to a research article -- journals want brief manuscripts; book publishers want full textbooks. Some colleagues have suggested self-publishing but I am concerned that this might not be a credible/respected route to pursue as a researcher and academic. Would love to hear what others think.
Group work is important in our profession and students need to be prepared to provide honest critique on performance. Yet, in the classroom, more often than not, students give peers full points, regardless of whether it is deserved or not. Would love to hear strategies others have used.
There is lots of controversy in the literature regarding learning styles. My experience in working with graduate students is that preferences do exist and should be recognized and considered. Do students fit neatly into boxes, no! I think the problem is trying to teach to a particular learning style rather than encouraging students to become adaptable and skilled at using all types of learning styles. The best learners use a wide variety of strategies to meet the needs of the situation. In addition, teaching strategies should be based on the content being delivered and not on a specific learning style. However, similarly, the best educators use a variety of strategies (e.g. examples, facts and theory, reflection, active engagement) to engage all types of learners as well as encourage all learners to become more adaptable learners. Wondering if others had thoughts on the usefulness (or not) of teaching and learning about learning styles?
I recently piloted an assignment in my teaching class that required students to present their message in an infographic. I am looking for a systematic/standardized strategy for assessment.
