Massage & Bodywork

NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2015

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F r e e S O A P n o t e s w i t h M a s s a g e B o o k f o r A B M P m e m b e r s : a b m p . u s / M a s s a g e b o o k 35 THE ENTRY LEVEL ANALYSIS PROJECT (ELAP): IDENTIFYING BASELINE LEARNING OUTCOMES Readers may be familiar with the monumental work of the Entry Level Analysis Project (ELAP) that was released to the public in 2013. The whole project and its supporting documents are available at www.elapmassage.org. The ELAP workgroup worked with the results of the Massage Therapy Body of Knowledge project (www.mtbok.org), along with multiple surveys and job task analyses that incorporated input from thousands of massage therapists across the country. Their goal: to establish baseline learning outcomes needed for a person to enter the massage therapy profession. As the president of the Massage Therapy Foundation (www.massagetherapyfoundation. org) at the time, I was honored to be a part of the coalition of national massage therapy organizations that sponsored the ELAP. In the process, this group developed a dedicated and extremely practical learning taxonomy for manual therapists (see graph on page 36) and created an extensive blueprint of suggested curricula structured on the learning levels and domains defined by the taxonomy. I support the ELAP's purpose, and I write a widely used core- curriculum textbook that was due for an update, so … it seemed a natural fit to take advantage of the opportunity to incorporate some of the ELAP principles into the sixth edition of MTGP. CRITICAL THINKING, CLINICAL REASONING From my perspective, the thing that is missing from many pathology courses is specific guidance in critical thinking and how that applies to clinical reasoning. Critical thinking is one of those terms that gets thrown around a lot without being specifically defined. For the purpose of developing my textbook and this article, I refer to the Foundation for Critical Thinking (www.criticalthinking. org). Here is a paraphrase of one of their suggested definitions: Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully analyzing, and/or evaluating information gathered by observation, experience, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. 1 In this context, critical thinking means "gathering and evaluating information, and putting it to use for the benefit of our clients." This ultimately leads to good clinical reasoning—and that is exactly the goal of my book. I want to help educators develop new massage therapists who are capable of effective critical thinking and clinical reasoning for their clients who live with health challenges. Happily, the ELAP supports this priority. One of the standards listed for pathology education is that learners should be able to "discuss the use of a clinical reasoning model (or critical thinking model) to problem-solve when working with pathologies." 2 WHAT DOES THIS LOOK LIKE IN A TEXTBOOK? I updated information on every single condition in MTGP from the previous editions, I brought it into alignment with the newest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), and I also added new sections on current research findings for relevant topics. This makes the book useful to massage therapists in practice who might want a more current pathology book than they already have. I am also excited to see this edition available as the first fully integrated ebook for massage therapy, with live links, embedded videos, and many other fun features. But the biggest structural changes in this edition apply more to educators than to readers. The conversion to the ELAP learning structure is most obvious in the end of chapter questions, in the student resources, and in the instructor resources. Language Everything in education begins with language. I tell my students (too many times, some might say), "If you can't say the word, you don't own the word." Readers may or may not remember what it was like to learn the language of massage, anatomy, or pathology, but I guarantee you didn't retain or internalize anything important until you had a way to express it. Vocabulary is the starting place for new ideas. In MTGP, much of Chapter 1 ("Fundamental Concepts in Pathology") is given to Greek and Latin word roots and to baseline vocabulary words that show up again and again in the text. Each chapter highlights words learners may not have encountered before, and definitions are

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